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> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.

Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.






To adapt the words of composer Frank Wilhoit:

"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."


I love Wilhoit's original, and want to note that he's been active lately on HN as well (<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FrankWilhoit>).

His sentiments are pressaged by others, including Adam Smith (1776):

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>

Or some guy named Matthew, somewhat earlier:

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

<https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-12.htm>


> For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

Matthew was a tax collector, this is literally expert advice, not just one of those religious metaphors.


> Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.

Exactly. This is the big boy version of "even your petty backyard patio needs a PE stamp" type crap.




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