Re:Tech bosses are globalists, not libertarians
by WalterBright on Wednesday September 13, 2017 @07:04PM
(#15243563)
Licensing is a typical regulation pushed by established businesses in order to limit the entry of new companies.
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.