How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

There will be a post in 9 months from software companies crying about the PLD and CRA because their leaders were asleep at the wheel for the last half decade.

This wasn't introduced "from tomorrow", people had 1 year and a half to prepare for this (at least) or to protest this. See some comments below how individual countries actually messed this up.

> But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.

> I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not)

It's good that you take the time to just make assumptions about how the EU is bad based on your knowledge on how it operates...

Within EU we already pay ~€3 for packages from China. And in Austria we will soon pay additional ~€2 for every delivered package. And 20% VAT.

Edit:

I am pretty sure at least some part of these already contribute towards recycling.

The goal here is likely not just to get more funding for recycling, but rather to use materials that can be recycled in the first place. Which you cannot achieve simply by charging businesses or consumers more.

The biggest problem in Europe is the obsession with taxes. Tax on recycling, tax on AI, tax on this, tax on that. So people who want to make money and keep it without having to fight absurd amounts of regulation and red tape just go elsewhere.

The Entry/Exit System was supposed to start in 2024[0], it was delayed to 2025, then it was delayed to 2026. They also changed from a full turn on to an incremental rollout over 180 days[1]. At some point you have to turn on things and "bugs will shake out", you can't delay things forever.

[0] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025...

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025...

The EU does that most of the time, and you have to add the duration of the European legislative process (~2 years in average) so it's hard to say companies don't have time to adapt.

The problem is that companies have repeatedly used “not adapting” as a strategy to postpone changes. The plan is quite simple: you don't adapt in time. Then the business lobby will repeat how unprepared the industry is and how they need a delay to prepare. Rince and repeat.

Are we talking about the same EU? In my experience EU is used as a scapegoat by national government, to push through unpopular legislation that they want "because it's an EU requirement". No one checks if they actually supported that same policy when it was actually decided in the EU - it would have been a ton of work too, since how decisions are actually made isn't exactly transparent. I think it's by design, EU is in large part made to take the blame for domestically unpopular policy. So it's not a surprise that UK conservatives eventually pivoted from profitably using the EU as a scapegoat, to sacrificing that same ghost.

This is EU doing it in a long span of time similar to GDPR or DMA. A lot of companies just choose to ignore the regulation until a week or two before it comes into effect.

The de minimis crackdown [0] and EPR [1] are both being rolled out because Chinese conglomerates like Pinduoduo (Temu) and SHEIN took undue advantage of that while ignoring European regulators on issues such as environmental regulations on packaging [2], dark patterns [2], breaching the Digital Services Act [3], and gacha/addictive engagement mechanisms [4].

All of OP's proposals directly conflict with the goal of de minimis taxation and the EPR.

Seems European HNers are fine with European regulations until it hurts their niche interests or pocketbook.

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/102e18d7-d06b-4405-a347-97bb3c373...

[1] - https://www.vereev.com/news/europe-faces-trade-conflict-is-e...

[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/ef72f186-2a02-4c51-927d-2c01ddece...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-says-temu-breach-r...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-probes-shein-over-...

It's an unwinnable situation. Again, EU-level politics keep assuming everyone (corporations and states) are adults. Unfortunately, everyone are just a bunch of screaming, scheming petulant children.

This is by design. It’s the same all over the world. The wealthy are not going to just let you compete

I would argue it's even worse, because with properly designed federated system you get checks and balances to some extent.

There are parts of EU that have almost zero oversight.

It's important to remember that even without the fact that big companies basically write the regulations, regulations naturally tend to being effectively regressive wrt company stage/size. Every new one is a hurdle that a bigger company has more resources to overcome.

There's truth to this but it's an overstatement as it stands. For example, GDPR rules are less strict for small companies.

Are these old ideas? The broad regulatory apparatus in the EU appears very modern and intentional.

And no, just because voting for MEPs is bolted on there as a pressure valve doesn’t suddenly make it all okay when most of the real decisions happen behind closed doors and adherence to the passed laws, no matter how damaging is ensured through financial coercion.

Not a single person voted or agreed to this law, and yet here we are.

This was traditionally something that the UK was better than the rest of Europe, having carve-outs for small businesses.

For sales to be "local", products need to be stored in warehouses in each country. But that in turn means the owner of said products (the seller) has to be registered for VAT in that country, and submitting annual reports in each country's language.

I went to the trouble of registering in 6 different countries; in some countries, Amazon more or less helps sellers submit reports; in others, they offer to partner with local lawyers.

The result is a mess of reports, injunctions, penalties for late filing, etc. coming to you in Polish, German, Spanish, Hungarian. I eventually gave up.

Europe is not actually a "single market". It's a federated bureaucracy entirely indifferent (or hostile) to small businesses.

A "Regulation" becomes "law" in any member state without modification. No member state has to adopt anything. Examples are the GDPR and the new Machine Regulation.

A "Directive" does not become "law" in any member state. A member state has to enact their own national laws to implement the directive until a given date. It does not have to be single law. It could spread many laws. An example is the Machine Directive before it was re-released as Machine Regulation.

More on the different types can be found here from the EU itself: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/types-eu...

I'm not convinced that's an accident. I think politicians in Europe are just better than those in the US at hiding who they really work for.

There are numerous examples of regulations in many European countries that create a glass ceiling for anyone who strives to be more than just middle-middle-class, while creating effective loopholes for the wealthy to continue multiplying their wealth.

For example, the total (State + Federal) top tax rate for someone living in California or New York is not too different (maybe 2-3%) from someone living in France or Sweden. But the difference is that in California the top rate does not kick in until you earn north of $1M per year, while in Sweden or France the middle class is already paying those rates.

Likewise, in the US you cannot (legally) shelter your income by declaring it to be foreign income, as you can in most European countries. That is a tax dodge not applicable to the middle class.

And then we have the present discussion: The compliance costs are of course too high for any small business, so these regulations are just another form of regulatory capture to prevent anyone new from breaking into the upper class, while allowing those already there to have it easy.

> the discussion here seems to have a lot of people who are in a big rush to demonize their perceived political opponents on ideological grounds.

No, it is the opposite. There are a whole lot of people trying to rationalize something crazy. Nevertheless, countless online shops in the EU run by small business have already closed thanks to these regulations. Even if your assertion that this is a giant misunderstanding were true, the damage is already done.

Instead of a FAQ page that starts with, you know, the FAQ, the actual information is hidden in a PDF download. Once you click it, there is another popup to confirm. That then leads to a PDF with 9 pages of misc front matter before you can see the first question. And the answers themselves are completely unreadable.

Take for example "3) Are envelopes containing letters, invoices, statements and other correspondence which serve a communication function considered to be packaging under the PPWR? NEW!": Three paragraphs of legalese just to say "no" in the most complicated and hard to understand way.

The whole document is 27847 words. If we ignore the complexity and assume the reading-speed number of 238 wpm that I often see cited, that's two hours of extra compliance overhead just to read the FAQ.

And for extra hilarity, the page is also covered in so many popups and warts that fight each other that on mobile you have to accept all cookies because the decline button is covered.

Edit: Also, I've been unable to find any diagram on either the page numbered 13 on the bottom of it or the page numbered 13 by the PDF reader (not the same thing, in 2026...). There are two diagrams nearby but none of them seem helpful. If you mean the one in "9) Who is the ‘producer’ of transport packaging?", it only covers a subset of cases (company A sells the packaging in the same member state). The text states "If company A sells the cardboard boxes to Company C in another Member State, and Company C fills the boxes to transport packaged products, then Company C would typically be the producer in that Member State." so we're back to square one.

"If a farmer packs a few apples in a container (sales packaging) and sells it under its own name or trademark to a retailer or consumer in the same Member State, the farmer is a producer [for the purpose of EPR obligations]"

And :

"If the farmer sells the packed apples under its own name or trademark in another Member State, the farmer is only the producer if the recipient is the end user of the apples."

And :

"If the farmer is a micro-enterprise, which is often the case, and the supplier of the apple container is established in the same Member State, such supplier becomes the producer"

That last exemption is quite restrictive, it can be a problem. I can attest that a French manufacturer of antistatic packaging refused to sell to me as a micro enterprise when I was selling electronics kits a long time ago and I had to buy them from China. Some states might not even have packaging manufacturers. So the concerns from the article are founded.

It is not a coincidence that here in Germany there are whole law firms specialized in suing small business owners (Abmahnkanzleien.)

I think for a lot of people the tradeoff might not be worth it.

The mere fact that people seem to be highly confused (I saw many posts about that the last week) speaks volumes.

Why introduce legislation that is so complex and hard to understand that people seem to be confused wether or not they’re affected. It’s highly irresponsible and arrogant thing to do.

"Within a Member State" is an important point here.

The relevant example is the preceding bullet on page 11: when a company fills a box and sends it directly to an end user in another Member State, that company becomes the producer in the destination country. In the article, the Greek maker is that company.

Micro-enterprises receive simplified reporting below 10 tonnes in the regulation, but they are not exempt from registration or destination-country EPR.

One has a tape on regular boxes that is branded

Other has stickers on the packages to identify it

And one has a small branded plastic packaging.

I doubt any of them is bringing home more than 500k EUR in revenues per year(giving a very safe margin there)

You still need to be compliant with PPWR, no matter you sell on Amazon, eBay, Aliexpress or the street corner.

Again, I often sympathize with the left leaning side of things, but you have to admit our side has a massive blind spot in terms of blaming all the worlds ills on a secret cabal of business elites instead of blaming the mechanism of government power actually creating the harm.

If we’re being honest, Amazon feels zero threat from European small businesses and quite frankly barely sees much value in their EU ecomm business at all. If anybody wants to see the EU turn into one market with one set of simple regulations it’s them. Trust me, they are not worried about small Etsy sellers.

The fundamental issue is the EU is a “union” in name only and the member states fundamentally don’t actually want to work together unanimously on most things. Yet, we’re paying all those officials in Brussels to do something, and the trivial green consumer issues like bottle caps are the only thing that doesn’t cause too big of a fight. It’s bike shedding 101. [1]

Until we acknowledge that this is the true root of the problem instead of inventing tired conspiracies, we cannot solve any of the issues.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Occam's Razor applies here. These regulations exist because the EU is 10,000+ civil servants writing whatever laws they want with no meaningful democratic accountability (this sort of thing is nobody's priority). They love creating new laws, they love micromanagement, they always have and they always will. There is nothing here we haven't already seen with things like the bottle top regulations, laws about how fast kettles can boil water and more.

And there is no end to this. The EU Commission is on a path that will completely kill the European economy, dragging it to Soviet levels or worse. By design there's no constitutional mechanism to force them to change course, save for every country following Britain and just leaving. That's why there's such a massive pile of propaganda trying to convince Europeans that Brexit was an unrepeatable disaster (which it wasn't, check the data for yourself).

(but yes it's "conveniently good" for Amazon as well)

so apparently, what you are describing is not what's actually happening.

If you dig a little deeper you will see that this legislation was sponsored, championed and lobbied by the largest pan-EU retail organization. How convenient. Just like Chinese EVs, can't let EU customers have access to the best goods for the lowest prices. Better to have lazy greedy EU businesses gouge them :)

Isn't that by far the simplest solution that removes any and all bureaucracy for almost everyone and still catches 99% of the cases?

If I were a small seller I would just ignore this, like many sellers on Temu do. Before you get into trouble, someone must take notice that you did not register for the recipient fiefdom's protectionism racket. And if that happens, it is not sure that you really are in trouble. As with the GDPR, this kind of regulation is almost unenforcable in practice.

It shows up in the stats, citizens almost always trust EU more than their governments and want EU to have more power but all this means those local governments becoming less important and therefore no one is really pushing for it.

Fingers crossed Trump invades Greenland so things can start moving.

The crooked MEPs also voted in favor of this law. They are just as culpable.

I'm not saying it's not true, it's just that it's so hard to follow these things when one is supposed to have a life as well

I have Claude Code PTSD.

Apparently it's undemocratic when elected governments of their countries destroy a good solution and then blame others.

- resentment that bad policy damages the institution’s reputation - annoyed it proves people i hate like correct

Of course this law it's complex for nothing, to me, they could have just added the cost of the recycling of the packaging material into the cost of the packaging material itself, making it that only the companies producing the packaging would need to comply (so that if you buy a box to ship something the cost of recycling of the box is already embedded in the cost of the box, like they did with plastic bags at the supermarket).

>EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level

Then aren't the people who hold it simply correct? Why brand this valid view as "insidious populists?"

>The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they just implemented.

This is probably the best way to emphasize it. It is completely absurd, useless, non-functional, etc.

That's the commission telling small businesses that please don't stop selling in the EU and suggesting member states should use common sense. Unfortunately, as with all EU directives the implementation and enforcement is up to the member states, and especially certain northern countries really love their bureaucrats leaving common sense at home in the morning and sticking to the exact letter of the law. The 200000 EUR fine is Germany specific I think, obviously a prime candidate here.

The point of this tax is not to raise revenue bit to disincentivize wate. Since the tax weight based, companies have an incentive to reduce packaging.

They see tourists and foreigners (even if they're from the EU) as a gigantic target to squeeze and screw as hard as they can. That's what you get when your economy is based on tourism and rich foreigners owning property there: you have to squeeze those hard for it's basically all you have. Officially tourism is "only" about 15% of the GDP but Spain is a service economy and so many of those services revolve around tourism and foreigner owning properties there. Same for the construction sector: they love it when rich tourists have fancy villas built there.

My wife used to own a house there. So did her mom. They sold it all and kissed Spain goodbye once and for all: too disgusted by how the fiscal authorities were treating them.

I won't go on vacation there anymore. Both my wife and my daughter speak spanish and yet we don't plan to go there anymore: she's done giving money to Spain to be seen, in return, as a lemon out of which more juice can be squeezed.

Vote with your feet and you wallet: when a country tries to fuck you, give it the middle finger.

The big corporations also don't want people to run small business, because they remove themselves from the job market and cannot be hired / exploited. So they lobby EU FOR regulations that ensure people cannot run business.

Of course if you are a person that ships 20 packages you don't register a company to do so, nobody will, you just sell them privately (and the exception to sell things privately is quite high, in my country you can do it up to 5000 euros AT YEAR, after that you need to declare the income in your tax declaration but still you don't need to register a company if it's not your main income).

The cost of bookkeeping for a very small business is essentially zero. Everywhere that I know of exempts small business from double entry bookkeeping. VAT exemptions exist if revenue is low enough, too.

Privacy requirements are even easier: don't ask for, store, or process any personal information you don't absolutely need.

Your barber is being dramatic.

Your device tends to need to be causing problems, that the FCC then go and track down, and then come back to you. That is (hopefully, depending on the kind of device) extremely unlikely.

As for Ali stuff, probably lots of it is not tested but still comes with a FCC label - but if it is shipped from overseas, who is going to take responsibility for it? Nobody… So there is nothing they can do except fine the person who bought it if it’s really causing problems (and usually I doubt they’d even do that if the user wasn’t intentionally doing something they shouldn’t have been, they are just told to stop and maybe the device would be seized/ destroyed)

https://emcfastpass.com/fcc-rules-kits-subassemblies/

Putting that board into an enclosure and then selling it now makes you the manufacturer, and you must certify that new product.

Imagine making a mod for a video game, and to legally cover your ass, go through months of testing that cost $250,000.

Talk about killing a project in the cradle.

On the flip side, there are engineers who absolutely do not give a fuck, and will design their product with zero regard for emissions. To them the world is "If it's not illegal, then I cannot comprehend why I cannot take it to the extreme".

Another small business owner reported their experience in this Reddit thread, looks really bad: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1vrz88a/comment/p4i...

I’m as pro-EU as one can get but that’s a mistake we should solve asap

That's just an excuse then. Register with whatever local authority in your country handles these things and in the unlikely event you get a grumpy letter just send them a copy of your registration documents.

The EU constantly pushes that either you sell to all EU-member-states at the same price or nothing at all.

As citizen of Germany I cannot really lobby the local polish government, so we are basically barred from that market by EU Regulations.

We are now in some sort of weird limbo where there is some weird language from the EU comission that they discourage punishment until some issues are ironed out so a good portion of our market segment just ignores the rules.

There are millions of dollars (and rubles) pumped into anti-EU propaganda that fuel this.

You don't have to set up a holding management structure for your company. It's there if you want to, but why make it complicated if you don't want a complicated structure?

If you're small, a simple eenmanszaak will suffice - which you can fill online, and then complete within an hour at the KvK.

>belasting breathing up your neck

Honestly I never had any issues with the belastingdienst, as long as you file your reports every quarter/year, and you're willing to pay the taxes you owe.

Any time I ever had issues, I just had to talk with one of their inspectors, go over my paperwork, and we sorted it out there. When I had issues with paying, it was one phone call to defer it for 2 years and set a payment scheme.

It's HN - everyone did the latter.

You’re the one making the claim, so please provide sources for your fantastical scenario. By your logic there should be no small coffee shops across the EU, yet this is verifiably and patently untrue.

You can still do such businesses, but the red tape and other requirements are enourmous: health department and construction applications, soil tests, inspections, manufacturing requirements, and so on. The additional costs and delays are passed on to customers.

It's not just septic tanks, it's all areas of construction and one of the reasons why in many states (like New York and California) it's impossible to make low-cost housing anymore, or (like in Florida) new regulations governing old construction are leading to sky-high reserve requirements and condo fees.

There's also the phenomenon of people just ignoring the laws or bypassing them. For your septic tank example, in Alabama out in the countryside people with low cost prefab houses ("double wides") don't want to pay $10,000 to dig a trench for a septic tank, so they just run sewer hoses deep into the woods or ditches. https://www.epa.gov/septic/surface-discharge-raw-wastewater-...

Who was wondering this? The EU has been hostile to small businesses and entrepreneurs from the beginning.

Worse. You can't even install septics in wide swaths of the country. Well, the evil people in the internet comments will say you can, but they're omitting the nonstarter costs, discretionary permits, etc, etc, that make it simply not worth it vs paying for city sewer or whatever mound system the compliance people want to make you buy.

So that sliver or industry that has 100x the compliance burden it used to has 1/100th the activity to amortize it over. Further shrinking it.

What a fucking nightmare

Well it is certainly the perfect conditions for it, the EU is surrounded by friends and enemies alike who openly seek to break it up and the biggest companies in the world are doing everything they can to defy and undermine regulation efforts.

Germany is the third largest economy in the world. The EU as a bloc is the second largest economy in the world.

While lagging considerably behind the US and China in services, it still is among the leaders in energy and manufacturing.

It’s in decline, but it’s really not anything that can’t be fixed.

Certainly not anywhere HN/Twitter like to make it out to be.

The EU is facing a two-front information war. A strong EU doesn’t benefit the US, Russia or China. Having said that, a lot of US criticisms that are propagandised against the EU are mostly fair criticisms, the EU makes it easy for its adversaries to propagandise low hanging fruit (such as the bureaucracy on display here)

It just so happens that the same is true for a lot of EU technical regulation.

At what point are we allowed to say "the EU is failing to regulate its members effectively"?

Or are we not allowed to say that because it would create some kind of catastrophe where the EU Commission loses its power over the EU27 and Russia invades (or somesuch catastrophising...?)

There really isn't much of astro-turfing in non-EU parts of the world that would make little sense, your narrative might make more sense if there were any actual evidence or credibility behind the claims that non-EU states are engaged in anti-EU discourse that doesn't apply to them.

The complaints against EU is a lagging effect and what you see today is cumulative, one that all federated organization eventually face. LLMs have little to do with it and its just more visible as it is quite literally in global discourse

And you are calling this astroturfing LLM based on what? It's really no different from calling tariffs so much winning and laughing at seething liberals.

There are several comments suggesting the EU did everything right and member states tanked it but this just feels like the EU operating as intended. The EU is comprised of sovereign nations. This is a normal outcome of what is essentially a P2P network. The central authority is illusory because the EU is not sovereign.

- Americans are usually willing to skirt the rules and figure it out later. This comes with risk but is ideal when you're early stage, low stakes, and you couldn't follow the rules anyway.

- Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book and will be shocked if you suggest otherwise. Being process oriented is great for high stakes industries where lives and safety are on the line but destroys startups, likely slowing or even killing innovation.

There is no floor to the level of "petty" that can happen here: the UK - granted, not the EU - goes after individuals who don't pay their TV license and determine the who by triangulating unlicensed TVs via radio trucks and inspectors looking in your windows.

Everywhere has their problems, I think Europe is doing fine.

Where do you think is a model society ?

The excessive prosperity ended together with the end of the colonization era (there are still a lot of european colonies but they aren't enough to make Europe rich).

Losing access to shamelessly cheap resources naturally and forced customers impoverished Europe and this process is still going. Same thing would be happening with the US thus the aggressiveness now.

Could you tell me how you brought immigrants to this and found them to be the problem?

What I find funny is that all of my packaging is re-used. I guess it's still "bad" that I'm sending non-EU packaging to EU, but at a global level, I'm way ahead. Re-using >>> re-cycling.

a 0.05 EUR spring, a 0.05 EUR bolt and a 0.05 EUR LED in the same package = 9 EUR fee

https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/ensuring-fa...

How about the law doesn’t exist if it doesn’t actually make sense?

Also, for those small cases, why not put responsibility (for any harm) more directly into both the customers and producers? For example, if a producer of a new low-volume product somehow manages to get a lot of waste packaging into the environment, they could be held responsible and pay a fee, or probably who discarded was the consumer, so the consumer in this case should be held responsible. I get that large corporations should be held to higher standards, and take stronger preemptive measures and follow stricter compliance rules.

I think the same should apply for all sorts of regulations, like electrical safety, radio emissions, etc.. If you're designing and selling a small product, you can and should take responsibility for what happens to it (in the case it is found your device bad design/construction itself caused injury, of course). Maybe the only thing you should be obliged to do was put a large sticker like 'WARNING: Prototype-class device. By opening you accept some RISK OF INJURY from device. Return to source if terms not accepted: (...)' -- that is, both you and the consumer should share some responsibility for trying something experimental.

Probably the overwhelming majority are completely harmless low-voltage devices.

In general, I think outcome-based and performance-oriented regulation is something that should be more widespread. Like, there should be in the worst case two options: (1) You follow a strict set of rules and guidelines that dictate how companies in your industry type should operate (specially important for high-risk stuff like nuclear plants, large civilian housing buildings, etc.); (2) You (instead) take increased resposibility for outcomes of your activity (products, devices, etc.), being liable for any damage at an increased rate.

how ironical

-- The EU was founded on the principles of four freedoms, Free movement of goods, Free movement of persons, Freedom to provide services, and Free movement of capital. --