Starting a company in a regulated field is hard. With unregulated fields like most internet companies, you "just do it" -- as long as you pay your taxes, the go

Starting a company in a regulated field is hard. With unregulated fields like most internet companies, you "just do it" -- as long as you pay your taxes, the government will pretty much leave you alone. In a regulated field, the hard part is not following the rules but merely trying to figure out what the rules are. People who haven't dealt with this are probably picturing something straightforward and readable like "thou shalt not put poison in the groundwater" but what you really get is thousands of pages of incomprehensible nonsense that you don't stand a chance of understanding on your own. There are law firms that can help with this, but now it's scary and expensive enough that the 18 year old founders will stay away. In purely unregulated fields like web hosting, there are tens of thousands of competitors because it's easy to create one. It's true that someone could go around buying up a bunch of them (and companies have done this), but even after they're done there are still thousands of competitors remaining. If a regulatory agency wrote couple thousand pages of rules for web hosts, many existing owners would probably sell their companies rather than embark of the emotionally draining task of trying to make sense of those rules. Ironically, as the number of competitors declines, the ones that remain will feel more free to abuse both employees and customers. This will lead to demands for more regulation, which reduces the number of competitors further, and so on it goes.