Yes, the solution is clearer rules. What drives compliance costs up is rarely the compliance itself, it's usually the uncertainty about your being in compliance or not.

That's also true for tax laws, labor laws, environment laws, almost every safety code out there, building zoning...

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sothatsit 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly this. As a recent example, the documents for the new Online Safety Act in the UK are over 2400 pages long! That means that even small businesses that want to comply have no reasonable option other than relying on summaries, and the regulator and big businesses will probably just negotiate on what the details actually mean in practice anyway.

I understand that there's nuance when dealing with all the edge cases to regulations. But it seems that the answer should not be extending the regulations to insane lengths to try to cover everything. That way lies insanity.

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mlyle 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, compliance itself is costly, but the cost is stuff that society decided it wanted to spend money on.

But uncertainty in compliance and time spent navigating compliance is nearly pure waste.

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a4isms 3 hours ago | parent [-]

To continue a conversation from another thread on another post, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and out-of-band context required are all costs that just happen to act as moats for entrenched incumbents. And no surprise, such incumbents often have so much influence over politics that they literally write the laws that regulate them.

The folksy aphorism goes, The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the expert's advantage.

	▲	marcosdumay an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not sure. Complexity is clearly hired by lobbyists all the time, but uncertainty and ambiguity seem to me to be mostly caused by incompetence. It's not even clear if uncertainty benefits incumbents more; it can just as likely destroy a market or benefit new entrants, and you can't predict which will happen at the time you create it (otherwise it's not uncertain). Legislative houses need technocratic QA. And that QA needs to be independent from the law-writing process.
	▲	mlyle 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes-- I think most of us are familiar with regulatory capture. But the solution to regulatory capture isn't "no regulation."