Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by uhhhhhhh 462 days ago
It's a horseshoe. At some point regulatory capture comes in and makes the environment too expensive to enter let alone compete with established players

No regulation and too much regulation have terrible impacts, but identifying the middle ground is it's own problem.

1 comments

...which is why the current tech regulations that Apple is running afoul of are only aimed at the top 1% of the market.

You're not gonna run afoul of Europe's antitrust laws by mere coincidence - you have to be a very big and established player before they become relevant (meaning you should have plenty of room to adapt, should you start to approach the limits specified in their legislation[0]). If you're just a small participant in the market, these laws aren't relevant to you.

Regulatory capture isn't really a risk for these regulations because most companies won't ever become that massive in the first place[0].

[0]: For reference, you need more than 75 billion euros in market value, 7.5 billion euros in profits from EU citizens or alternatively, more than 45 million active end users and more than 10k business customers before the real "big teeth" EU antitrust legislation (the Digital Markets Act) becomes relevant for a company. The overwhelming majority of tech companies aren't even close to being in that position (and almost certainly don't have a market cap that comes close to this), it's pretty much only GAFAM and ByteDance that are in this position.

Oh we agree.

Honestly we're well past effective anti trust laws but the EU is leading the way at least in many ways at getting back to somewhere sane.