[waisbrot]

Is that a great example? If you gave Mattel the choice between absorbing a regulatory framework and just having extra money would they really have chosen the former?

You can pay for safety explicitly with regulation or implicitly with poisoned children. Regulation hits small businesses harder; rather than concluding that regulation sucks, maybe we should try something else like providing some publicly-funded office to provide compliance help to small businesses.

[Mirioron]

You will never get anywhere close to mitigating the harm that regulation does to innovation through something like that. Approach this from the perspective of UX design. The more barriers a user has to overcome the less likely they are to actually try the product. In this case the user would be a small entrepreneur trying something small. But a lot of businesses start out as something small. If they work then they grow, if they don't they go back to the drawing board. If you put barriers on the way of these people they often won't even try.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to start a business, but it does mean you'll get a lot less of them. A lot less of them also means less successful ones and less jobs.

[spaginal]

Or just allow the free market and our courts to punish the offenders when they do bad things. If Google and Facebook violate privacy, sue them. If Mattel caused harm, sue them. Get the information out there that the service is bad or the toy is unsafe and they will either fix the behavior or go away.

Regulations may or may not be necessary for certain things, but to fold everything in the market under some kind of regulatory framework where you need to go to government to get approval and navigate a burdensome bureacratic process basically just ensures that you will harm innovation, destroy small business, and protect legacy companies in the space.