> why would big companies be spending so much money fighting these regulations?
Because the costs are onerous to everyone and it's not worth spending ten billion dollars in compliance costs to destroy competitors who were only costing you a billion dollars in revenue to begin with and are very useful to have around to fend off antitrust inquiries.
And if it won't negatively impact small tech companies then why are so many small tech companies against it?
> Automated content filtering fails to meet the requirements of the EU article, so it will disproportionately impact large companies which rely on those systems, rather than smaller ones which use human moderation teams.
Hardly anything disproportionately impacts large entities. If a small entity can do something, the large entity can just do the same thing more times, and then optimize any parts of it that are susceptible to economies of scale.
And converting something you can do to something you have to do will always disproportionately impact small entities. What happens when your moderator goes on vacation? If you're YouTube you have a million more of them, if you're a single person business the moderator is you and now you can never take a vacation from it, even when you're about to burn out.
And you can't just have moderators anymore, now you need moderators who know how to make their moderation comply with the new law. Even assuming the cost of training a moderator is the same, now the larger company has the advantage again because they're using full-time moderators instead of spending the founder's time to learn how to do it themselves even though they only spend 10% of their day doing moderation. And then spend 10% of their day doing that when it used to be 3% because now there are more rules to comply with.
The way you make a requirement disproportionately impact large companies is by only applying it to large companies, say ones with a billion in revenue or more. But they haven't done that.