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.