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Comment by isodev | Hacker News Reader

> regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply

This is a very inaccurate view. I’ve worked with multiple SMEs and no such “complexities” ever become operational challenges. Even as a indie developer, my compliance is a default provided I’m not trying to do something shady.

Looking into the EU regulations, in most cases what they want you to do (or not do) is common sense.

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Same experience, from startup to large multinational EU companies.

The biggest headaches/issues are normally local regulations (country specific or even more local). The EU directives are more frameworks with a lot of flexibility and well grounded on common sense + expertise. How the different countries implement them in their own laws (with their own historical laws) is a different story.

Right, and the entire point of the EU is to reduce regulatory overhead by extracting regulations to a bigger governing body.

The US has 50 sets of regulations and I don't hear anyone complaining. Although they should - you're almost certainly controlled by California law because, surprise surprise, complying with 50 sets of regulations is hard.

In IT it may be the case. In foodtech it is a problem. This may sound reassuring, as we don’t really want much of the stuff being sold in the US here in the EU. But, for new approaches regarding food production the EU regulatory environment is unfortunately a morass. There are lots of regulation which is neither fact or experience based, for example around insects, or ecological labelling.

This indie dev begs to differ https://x.com/levelsio/status/1833126426142179653

That indie dev got contacted by the government for feedback. Not a bad sign, in my opinion.

There’s some definite nope’s in there — excluding small companies from GDPR, exempting them from corporation tax on profits etc

Most of that is adjacent to regulation, and it's more or less asking for exemption from regulation for smaller companies. Which the EU already does a lot of: generally smaller companies have much lower regulatory regulatory requirements. But the threshold proposed is silly: you do not need to be anywhere near a $10 million company for complying with the listed regulations to be a pretty trivial amount of work. I do suggest reading these things, for the most part they can usually be sorted with a bit of paperwork, the kind of thing someone who's reasonably on it can bang out in a day or so. (Especially software: hardware can be a bit more of a pain, but that's because of important shit like not starting fires or electrocuting someone)

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