[pron]

Bureaucracy is annoying, slow, and unjust. But the situation now is much better than when the market was unregulated and robber barons did as they pleased. The American people suffered under the tyranny of the free market, they called on the government to save them, and it did. Nothing is perfect, and everything requires constant work and improvement, but we can use a gentle reminder now and then of how things used to be.

I don't think anyone believes Silicon Valley engineers are a bunch of miserable, oppressed working-class folk, but it's good to know how even the most seemingly progressive of corporations behave.

As to "making compliance so hard that smaller players would find it very expensive to compete", I think that regulation sometimes swings this way, but it is sometimes gradually, slowly, fixed. I don't think anyone would say that all regulation is always good for the big players and bad for the small ones.

Lastly, where does the money come from?

[smsm42]

>>> I think that regulation sometimes swings this way, but it is sometimes gradually, slowly, fixed

The first sometimes is more like "almost always" and the second one is more like "almost never". Government regulation is a ratchet - easy to move one way, almost impossible to move the opposite way.

>>> Lastly, where does the money come from?

That, as I said, the question that is never asked. Because everybody feels entitled to have the money, nobody ever asks who's paying the money. Consumers? Shareholders? Taxpayers? Who cares.

[pron]

Do you think that without regulation there will be less barriers for the small players? Because I can assure you that the Robber Barons made sure there were no small players left. They either bought them out or forcefully drove them out of business. As much as regulation places a burden on the small guys, if you let the big guys alone at it, they will make it much harder. This isn't theoretical; that's how it actually happened (and if the US 100 years ago is too far back for you, look at Russia in the past 20 years).

[smsm42]

Russia in the past 20 years is an example of a libertarian no-regulation state? Are you kidding me? Russia is a corruptocrat authoritarian state with no independent courts, virtually no independent media outside of internet, no rule of law or personal protection of property and person, official state censorship, and is corrupt to the core, with rampant extortion and bribery on every level of the government. And yes, plenty of invasive regulation that is used exactly to extort these bribes. Latest state initiative, recently introduced into Duma, is mandatory registration with the state of every internet site and mandatory preservation of users' activity logs by every site operator: http://lenta.ru/news/2014/02/28/data/

I'm sorry, did you just mention Russia as an example of state with no regulation? Ignorant, joking or trolling?