5 ms·

If you start asking for customer support as part of regulation, you massively raise the entrance costs for other companies.

AnIrishDuck 13y ago
x100. Plus, I'll believe the government can regulate good customer service into companies the day I don't dread going to the DMV.
smacktoward 13y ago
This is an easy problem to avoid: just have the regulation only kick in when you bring in a certain amount of revenue. PayPal did $1.5 billion in revenues in Q1 2013. So you could draw a line at $1bn/year, say, which would be more than high enough to leave out any reasonable definition of a "startup" while still covering established market leaders.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  It's an easy problem to talk about avoiding, sure. We can see an obvious failure mode, so we just won't do that. But it won't be you doing it in the first place, you won't have that sort of authority. You've got to think what sort of person's going to be giving you what you ask for, what sort of terms they're likely to impose. The person doing it won't always have an incentive to avoid the same things that you or I might think of as undesirable. The last thing you want to do is to ask for something, be one of a selection of competing viewpoints on it, and then get the Cthulhu version imposed on you. Can you get rules that make sense out of a system? Sure. But the tendency is that you won't - at least not without a threat that forces a uniformity of interest upon the system.
  - smacktoward 13y ago
    You're assuming that "the system" is something that has no inputs to affect the behavior of "the person doing it". Which is wrong. There are plenty of points in the rulemaking process (see https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaking_process.pdf https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...) where those in the startup community could ask for a more targeted rule, if such a rule were being considered. And given how no politician wants to be tagged as being against job creation at the moment, I have to think it'd be an easy sell to convince them that a more narrowly targeted rule would be in everybody's best interest. "The system" doesn't need to have "uniformity of interest" in order to make sensible things come out of it; you just need to be willing to make your voice heard within it, and to accept that you may have to compromise a bit from your ideal outcome in order to get other interests to come along.

AnIrishDuck 13y ago

x100. Plus, I'll believe the government can regulate good customer service into companies the day I don't dread going to the DMV.

smacktoward 13y ago

This is an easy problem to avoid: just have the regulation only kick in when you bring in a certain amount of revenue. PayPal did $1.5 billion in revenues in Q1 2013. So you could draw a line at $1bn/year, say, which would be more than high enough to leave out any reasonable definition of a "startup" while still covering established market leaders.

6d0debc071 13y ago
It's an easy problem to talk about avoiding, sure. We can see an obvious failure mode, so we just won't do that. But it won't be you doing it in the first place, you won't have that sort of authority. You've got to think what sort of person's going to be giving you what you ask for, what sort of terms they're likely to impose. The person doing it won't always have an incentive to avoid the same things that you or I might think of as undesirable. The last thing you want to do is to ask for something, be one of a selection of competing viewpoints on it, and then get the Cthulhu version imposed on you. Can you get rules that make sense out of a system? Sure. But the tendency is that you won't - at least not without a threat that forces a uniformity of interest upon the system.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  You're assuming that "the system" is something that has no inputs to affect the behavior of "the person doing it". Which is wrong. There are plenty of points in the rulemaking process (see https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaking_process.pdf https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...) where those in the startup community could ask for a more targeted rule, if such a rule were being considered. And given how no politician wants to be tagged as being against job creation at the moment, I have to think it'd be an easy sell to convince them that a more narrowly targeted rule would be in everybody's best interest. "The system" doesn't need to have "uniformity of interest" in order to make sensible things come out of it; you just need to be willing to make your voice heard within it, and to accept that you may have to compromise a bit from your ideal outcome in order to get other interests to come along.