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Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations. It's almost always a headache and distraction from the core business. However when regulation is finally foist

Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations. It's almost always a headache and distraction from the core business. However when regulation is finally foisted upon them, they make sure to take the time to influence what regulation they are subject to so that it benefits them and becomes a barrier to entry for new entrants.

jnbiche 9y ago
> Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations I disagree strongly with this. The leading companies of any given industry sector routinely lobby for more regulations, or at the very least they lobby to retain existing regulations. As a younger man, I used to be perplexed by this until learned about regulatory capture.
hibikir 9y ago
The regulation doesn't have to be foisted upon them at all: Regulation that just harms new companies, or competitors of a very different shape, is introduced at the behalf of industry groups all the time. What makes Silicon Valley tech special here is that most of the big companies have great network effects or economies of scale, so it's not as if adding regulations on top will help them much: The moats are already very large. On the other hand, they are all still growing, and regulation rarely helps anyone that is growing. The one case where regulation helps them though is when it removes lower levels of regulation. Imagine you are a ride sharing company for a second. Would you rather have individual regulations per city, or limit them to one per state, or even one per country? The simpler the regulation, the better, as you want to enter new markets as easily as possible, and a big, umbrella regulation is far better than a lot of incompatible ones, even if said umbrella regulation happened to be more onerous than most local regulations. We saw a lot of this with the strengthening of the EU. A lot of incompatible laws became unified, and thus selling to more markets became easier. You might even have a company push for said regulation when there is none, as long as it has provisions to stop new, smaller scale regulations from popping up.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Licensing is a typical regulation pushed by established businesses in order to limit the entry of new companies.

jnbiche 9y ago

> Yeah, companies don't generally want regulations I disagree strongly with this. The leading companies of any given industry sector routinely lobby for more regulations, or at the very least they lobby to retain existing regulations. As a younger man, I used to be perplexed by this until learned about regulatory capture.

hibikir 9y ago

The regulation doesn't have to be foisted upon them at all: Regulation that just harms new companies, or competitors of a very different shape, is introduced at the behalf of industry groups all the time. What makes Silicon Valley tech special here is that most of the big companies have great network effects or economies of scale, so it's not as if adding regulations on top will help them much: The moats are already very large. On the other hand, they are all still growing, and regulation rarely helps anyone that is growing. The one case where regulation helps them though is when it removes lower levels of regulation. Imagine you are a ride sharing company for a second. Would you rather have individual regulations per city, or limit them to one per state, or even one per country? The simpler the regulation, the better, as you want to enter new markets as easily as possible, and a big, umbrella regulation is far better than a lot of incompatible ones, even if said umbrella regulation happened to be more onerous than most local regulations. We saw a lot of this with the strengthening of the EU. A lot of incompatible laws became unified, and thus selling to more markets became easier. You might even have a company push for said regulation when there is none, as long as it has provisions to stop new, smaller scale regulations from popping up.

WalterBright 9y ago
Licensing is a typical regulation pushed by established businesses in order to limit the entry of new companies.