| ▲ | wolvoleo 13 hours ago | |
I think regulation and deregulation doesn't mean good/bad for small business anyway. For example the EU just extended mandatory packaging regulations (PPWR and EPR) for businesses of any size, today. Meaning small artists sending as little as one package to an EU country have to register in that country (there is no central EU registry) and pay yearly fees which add up to thousands for all EU countries. In advance, no less. This even applies if you just chuck one single pendant in a tiny bubblewrap envelope, it's ridiculous. And it applies even within the EU where there is supposed to be a free open market. They have to pay the same fees as a Temu or Amazon, for whom a few thousand euros is peanuts. So a lot of independent artists are cutting shipping to the EU or only allowing some where registration is free. This is one example where regulation is literally targeting small businesses to kill them. | ||
| ▲ | mindslight 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Yes, you are describing the dynamic I am talking about. My point about "deregulation" was in the US context where there is a strain of people who reflexively infer that deregulation must be good, from a general idea that regulations are bad. Regulations most certainly can be bad (as is the one you're describing), but this does not imply that blindly "removing regulations" is good! Because what tends to happen is that the type of regulation you are describing (registration/compliance/etc creating a fixed costs that are hard on small businesses but easy for large businesses) never gets removed. Rather what does get removed is regulations that are inconvenient to the large businesses - things like right of withdrawal [0], liability, anticompetitive restrictions on large businesses who have now become unavoidable parts of an uncompetitive market [1], etc. [0] IIUC "right of withdrawal", at least. It's an EU thing where you have a legal right to return products after a purchase, right? Whereas in the US it operates more on custom, customer satisfaction, and marketing. [1] eg if artists have to start selling through Amazon (etc) rather than shipping direct | ||