[AnthonyMouse]

> Deeply profitable companies will fight tooth and nail against these regulations even if they are full aware of the damage they are causing.

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.

[hgsgm]

Data sharing is a great example. Small Biz A can't share data with Small Biz B, but Biz G can share data between Product A and Product B and their thousands of employees.

[RandomLensman]

Large customers tend to limit data sharing - also in large businesses. Retail customers usually don't have that kind of power.

[TeMPOraL]

OTOH, Big G is also a single target should they start abusing that data - as opposed to Small Biz A and Small Biz B, which will just disappear and reopen as Small Biz C and D. Being larger has advantages, but it's not all advantages.