Switzerland is fairly expensive though [0]. Might not be a problem for Pavel Durov, but maybe for his engineers?

Anyways I would have expected more than a simple gmail address from someone developing a crypto messenger. A GPG Public Key too much to ask?

Otherwise Switzerland is indeed quite a nice play for businesses. Founding a company takes about half an hour. So that should count as fairly unbureaucratic. Plus Google etc. have their Europe headquarter here.

[0] Source: I live there.

You're talking about a "crypto messenger" that doesn't have end-to-end encryption enabled by default (and is therefore insecure by default, just like Whatsapp and other apps like that), so maybe you're expecting too much of him.

Germany is a good second choice after Switzerland, I think. Iceland would still be my #1 choice for Wikileaks-like companies, but I don't think Telegram is in that situation, and they might prefer a warmer weather anyway.

Germany? As an expat in Germany, the amount of bureaucracy here is sucking the life out of me. YMMV, though.

As a German expat who moved to the UK to start a business, I second this. Incorporating (a GmbH) in Germany would've been a major nightmare compared to the UK. Not that I'd recommend the UK as a good location at this point.

The problem is, the further south you go, the more the red tape tends to pile up.

Germany is a NATO country and might obey requests from NSA.

what makes you think that way about germany?

Find it strange how people feel free to give advise on things they have no clue about. ie the Swiss only recently voted for a very harsh anti-immigration law, targeting especially Europeans in fact, and more so from the eastern block (prostitution and crime coming from Russia, Bulgaria etc. in big cities), but not limited to.

And for the Dutch, please. Dutch hypocrisy and inferiority complex is at its peak. Just the political climate there is enough to put any decent human being off, with such support for the extreme right (Wilders) becoming mainstream, why would anyone want to live or work there, is beyond my understanding.

In my family's experience Switzerland can be a quite hard place to be a foreigner though, unless you work in one of the UN "enclaves" in the major cities. And then it is just very expensive.

Other than banking secrecy, what other advantages does switzerland have? Most markets and research areas are just as regulated as in the rest of europe (i.e. heavily).

I read a year ago that the Netherlands were about to pass big reforms to shrink the welfare state. Did that ever happen?

Also; not really. Small changes on the fringes and generally lowering welfare payouts but nothing too massive, luckily.

Firing was made a lot easier in the private sector though; reducing it to essentially at will employment with a forced separation allowance.

More or less. One thing that is happening in the near future is moving the responsibilities for long-term care from the national government to local municipalities, that will probably get less money for it as well.

High living costs.

There are lots of nice places in Eastern Europe where the living costs are low, the weather nice and the scenery beautiful.

And in quite a few (e.g. Romania) the government is too busy stealing stuff to bother about oppressing freedoms, except maybe about elections...

Yes indeed! Beautiful countryside and really excellent internet connections.

For example: "Based on Net Index report at the end of first half of 2013, Timișoara has become the city with the highest download speed in the world. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania

> And in quite a few (e.g. Romania) the government is too busy stealing stuff to bother about oppressing freedoms

Doesn't that also mean that the government would gladly accept a bribe from a foreign state actor in exchange for suppressing the freedom of the telegram team?!

If things there are anything like in Greece, the system is corrupt and dysfunctional enough to not care about newfangled problems (there's literally no enforcement of anything limiting online (maybe even offline) freedom here), but not corrupt enough to do egregious/outright illegal things because of bribes.

Probably not from Russia, in Romania's case. But it is a point, maybe not worth betting on.

Funny, I chose my DigitalOcean VPS to be located in the Netherlands rather than the UK. Freedom comes in various levels.

Because you felt that gave you some legal protection, despite the fact that you're using a US-based company?

The advantage of locating in the Netherlands is that you get served to Europe a little quicker.

Physical protection, not legal protection.