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Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know this issue, I don't study it. But from afar:

>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.

>This is precision work. These companies get too big and anger the wrong person, so they get knocked. However, we obviously see that when its so big, these violations last significantly longer and often can go unpunished.

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> An EU law stiffles all companies > it feels like near anarchy

These two... really don't work together, unless my idea of what the word 'anarchy' means is different.

Anyway, an EU based company that wants to trade in the US also has its own slew of legality to consider, including dealing with work visas when visiting, state vs federal laws, import taxes, etc. [0] is the tip of the iceberg. A lot of tech companies will just "move" to the US in order to make things easier (just like a lot of US companies move to e.g. Ireland)

[0] https://www.kvk.nl/en/international/doing-business-with-the-...

The DMA specifically only applies to platforms with more than 45 million active users.

> An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies

The arguments from Americans against the recent EU regulation is usually the opposite - that it is laser targeted at large US companies "because the EU is jealous that they don't have any large tech companies of their own and just want to cash in on fines"

>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I

That is true of some EU laws. Many have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies. GDPR for example, and the early versions of VATMOSS in terms of things I have dealt with.

Also, non EU laws such as the UK's Online Safety Act.

Not just in technology. It is also true of UK licensing laws for pubs - an example my attention was drawn to by comments made by the SEO of a big pub company as giving it an advantage.

On the other hand the EU's DMA and a lot of competition regulation gets that right.

This tends to be a property of regulations in general. It costs money to comply. At a minimum you often need to hire an expert that actually understands the regulation and can explain how to comply with it.

In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.

Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.

Yes, it is a frequent problem, but efforts should be made to limit it.

It is a factor that should be considered when designing regulations. The comment with regard to the pubs was that the regulatory paperwork was a major cause for businesses being put up for sale.

There are many regulations that should exempt businesses under a certain size or with other criteria. For example small businesses that do not trade data should be largely exempt from GDPR. Small not for profits even more so.

Similarly, with VATMOSS the initial sales limit for registration was set ludicrously low.

Underlying this is a political failure to understand or even consider impacts on small businesses. When politicians talk to business they inevitably talk to big businesses.

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