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Comment by grimblee | Hacker News Reader

Oh, look what "over-regulation" does, forcing companies to comply to standards so they can't vendor lock-in their users (this happened with the iphone charging port too, from the apple specific port to usb-c).

Guess this type of consumer-benefic changes wouldn't happen in the land of "freedom".

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I think the land of “freedom” knows that “Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

It's likely that without laws such as the DMCA, there would already be easier, legally legitimate ways to circumvent Apples technology preventing interoperability. So as usual the new regulations try to cancel out the problems caused by the previous regulation, while having their own side effects that require future regulation to cancel out, ad infinitum.

That’s unlikely.

Why would that be likely

A positive effect from regulation does not rebut the general argument against government regulation of industry.

The problem with regulation isn’t that there are never any positive effects, of course there are.

The problem is it’s impossible to reliably avoid adding substantial friction to life via overly broad regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, or outdated but still-in-effect regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, at least.

If this only bothered huge companies then I would say cost of doing business, who cares, etc, but it actually affects things like how cities and towns are designed, how expensive housing is, how expensive medical treatment is, etc.

Even though overly broad regulation is a risk, I don't believe little/no regulation is an option either. I don't think the US's consumer protection mechanisms work, and I'm happy to accept the downsides of the EU's systems that come with the upsides of regulation.

It's unclear exactly what you're arguing, but I think if you are arguing that, because of the unavoidable substantial friction caused by regulation, we shouldn't have any regulation of industry at all... I think it's trivial to find examples where banning all regulation of industry would make the world a much, much worse place. Much worse than the friction.

> It's unclear exactly what you're arguing

Actually, it's perfectly clear to me.

> we shouldn't have any regulation

Nope, he's not saying that at all. He's just saying that any regulation (no matter how necessary, well intended or even perfect it is) has a cost. And that cost is accumulating across all regulations.

Furthermore, that cost is easily supported by large incumbents (big fans of regulation, btw) but it hurts startups the most. Thus the more regulations a market has, the fewer startups will have. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means less innovation, fewer products and higher prices. We can easily see this effect unfolding in the housing, education or health markets.

Bottom line is: we must take those second order effects of regulation into consideration when talking about it.

I mean, housing and medical treatment are more expensive in the US because the market is unregulated and so the capital exploits the poor who can't do otherwise for those basic needs.

You defeated your own argument ? Thanks !

> housing and medical treatment are more expensive in the US because the market is unregulated

Is it really unregulated though?

Pretty sure pricing isn't. Can't US medical companies essentially charge what they like? As long as they don't align with each other to price gouge customers...even though I imagine they do anyway (just very carefully).

There is definitely a third option of "badly regulated through regulatory capture that favors incumbents, prevents competition and makes things worse for the public, while protecting actual malfesance". The US has a lot of this. The EU version tends just to protect the incumbent too much.

These industries are objectively heavily regulated in the US. I don’t know what you are talking about. Maybe you would like them to be more regulated, and that’s a position one can hold, but that doesn’t make them unregulated today.

I really wish microeconomics was a high-school or secondary school required course. It's one of the most applicable to life and voters well-studied disciplines that describes the effects of certain actions towards or away from a competitive market, market elasticity and barriers to entry, explains positive and negative externalities of government action, and how those actions affect consumer pricing and supply (a lot of the topics here and below). Without studying this topic we view words with different underlying assumptions or definitions and it's a lot more effort / time / replies to not talk around each other. It's like two people who only use Windows for Instagram trying to argue about why Apt requiring Rust is good or bad. I'm not weighing in for or against the topic in this thread or its replies, just a plug to study Microeconomics if this stuff interests you!

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