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The first type of 'no' is summarized as just being annoying to implement and not making a big difference, but I think it can be a lot deeper and more consequential than that. There can be regulation that will damage a companies profits, but also provides positives to public health or other beneficial outcomes. Deeply profitable companies will fight tooth and nail against these regulations even if they are full aware of the damage they are causing. They will come up with as many convincing sounding reasons to say "no" as possible in the name of those immense profits they enjoy, and use techniques like expensive lobbying, sponsoring pseudoscientific studies, running ads, play up fears about economic damage or other negative outcomes of the policy, etc. They try to make it sound like the second or third kinds of "no" in the article and paint it as a bad idea, or impossible to do, or anything else they can to prevent the regulation. And if a certain individual at that company doesn't want to fight for their unethical profit, they'll be swiftly replaced with someone who will. The obvious (non tech) example is something like the tobacco industry, which spent millions on manipulating public and policy opinion using misleading scientific sounding language or studies to prevent or delay regulation despite being fully aware of the many health detriments of smoking. Public health has been significantly improved as a result of smoking reduction, restrictions on where you can smoke in public spaces, age restrictions, whatever. I think there is a lot of this currently in companies profiting off social media, oil and gas, and selling user data. |
Unfortunately this is also very similar to one of the most insidious forms of regulation -- the mildly inefficient requirement. You have something which is absolutely not going to bankrupt the company, but it costs three times more than it's worth.
It may even provide some benefit to someone -- someone who is happy to lobby in favor of it if it means they get a third of the money that it's costing customers to require it.
But then inefficiency increases and costs go up and barriers to entry to go up and the market becomes more concentrated, and the incumbents only make a weak showing of opposition because it's not going to kill them and they actually like that it might kill some of their smaller competitors.
So rules like that accumulate, even though they're each a net negative to the world, until people can't make ends meet because everything costs so much more than people get paid. And nobody can point to one single rule as the problem because it's really ten thousand of these little inefficiencies adding up.