The claim regulating the big players will actually hurt the little guys is the common cry of the big player hoping they don't actually end up getting regulated. As your comment points out, it really doesn't hold up to a cursory examination of what's being claimed and how they stand to gain. ;)
"Where is the over-regulation I keep hearing about?"
It's baked into the cake, as grandalf noted. More regulations benefit larger players, who can afford the parasitic staff of lawyers, accountants, and other compliance people to deal with it.
While the big guys don't like regulation, as such, as long as the regulation is applied evenly across the board it doesn't really affect them that much (they just raise prices). It does do a wizard job of discouraging upstart competition, though.
It's just a general behavioral trend I (and plenty of others) have noticed in arguments against regulation coming from monopolies. When a big tech company claims a regulation it dislikes would hurt newer players from competing with it, you have to ask... why are they so opposed then?
Is it out of the goodness of their hearts that large companies complain about regulation hurting small businesses? Or is it because the regulation will cost them a ton of money they'd rather keep in the bank, and they know they already have enough market capture to continue to obliterate small businesses either way?
When someone says that regulations on large companies will actually hurt small businesses, the first thing you should do, is look who is claiming that, and see where they get their funding from. It's almost always a think tank funded by the biggest player in the market being discussed.
The regulations might be partly in place to protect the big players from pesky small competition? I have no way to judge that, though. But if that's the case, perhaps the regulations can be changed.
That generalization is pretty obviously wrong. The vast body of antitrust regulation is designed precisely to hurt the "already big". Regulations around net neutrality would also fall into the category of helping the little guy far more than a big player. Regulation certainly can hamper smaller businesses, but it really depends on how the regulation is designed.
Exactly. Large companies love regulations when they affect everybody since they can easily abide the regulations while they help to destroy potential competitors.
Keeping regulations focused on big players serves the dual purpose of focusing regulation where its affect will be most significant, while also ensuring it doesn't negatively affect the market. But yeah, like you're mentioning the big problem is that once companies reach a certain size they begin to develop the political connections necessary for them to simply kill, or at least castrate, any potential regulation that might genuinely require them to behave in a way that is inconvenient - even if it's better for society.
Rushing to create laws due to outrage is the worst thing for small players. The big players will find the loopholes quickly and the smaller players in the sector feel the hurt of regulation.
Don't big players in every industry lobby for more regulation? Does this mean that this is what is good for the markets they are dominant in? I fail to see this implication.
That argument is often used in bad faith/FUD by the big players themselves to halt any regulation attempts.
Regulations can be adapted to affect only the companies that reach X percentage in sales or in market share. The EU's Digital Markets Act does precisely this, for instance.
The regulators can let smaller players grow and thrive, and regulate them once they've exceeded a certain threshold.
I agree that it harms smaller companies (though some are not that small), but I see this as a big step in the right direction. I think the big players can only be stopped by legal means anyway.
All I see is a great opportunity for the big guys to go from regulation -> regulatory capture -> rent seeking.
When you have a few big players they love to see regulations that make it harder for upstarts to enter the market since they won't have an army of employees who's only job is to ensure compliance with the bureaucratic demands.
This seems to me like it will have exactly the opposite intended effect, that the large players are the only ones who will be able to operate under this new regulatory burden.
That isn't a general truth. Regulation usually favours larger players because regulation favours businesses who can demonstrate compliance with regulation, and that is usually expensive. It is also much easier to achieve compliance if it is an incremental change to an existing business rather than something to be absorbed from scratch - so regulations also favour established businesses.
On one hand, traditional regulation keeps small or part-time players out of the market, because regulatory overhead is too high. The relative burden of regulation on large companies is much less, because they can amortize the cost across more business.
On the other hand, this only works if these smaller players get relief from regulations -- which means that they are operating outside the laws and regulations. For instance, turning an apartment building into a hotel via Airbnb sidesteps rules around zoning, tax collection, housing policy, etc. You could decide that these regulations are just annoying red tape, but they were put in place for legitimate purposes in the past and it seems like we ought to at least consider the impact before we throw the baby out with the bath water.
A third argument is that peer to peer marketplaces are changing the balance of power between producer and consumer. As a consumer, this sounds great -- but the person at the other end of the line is now an individual, not a giant corporation. When I have a bad cab ride, I go on Facebook and bitch about it, and life goes on. When I have a bad Uber ride, I give the driver one star and they may very well get fired -- and Uber will just replace them with one of the teeming masses hoping to make it rich driving strangers around for a living.
This is the standard scream of incumbent players when they want to discourage regulation. It both ignores the fact that what's "reasonable" for an incumbent monopoly and a small startup are different, and that the law generally accounts for scale.
Isn't it much worse to have big companies in a heavily-regulated industry where those big companies largely control the regulations? Surely they will influence the regulations to increase barriers of entry into their industry.
As I wrote already in another comment: all these regulations will end up doing is strengthen the market position of the established players and cripple any competition from new incumbents :(
It’s the end of an era...not too long ago anyone could compete with the big players...soon nobody will
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