Comment by cloverich

To extend @bradleyjg's point, businesses often do try and "do the right thing" but don't always get the "voters" support. For instance, you could have no ads or tracking on your site, and just charge people to view the content. And of course the vast majority of people will simply not view it, go find a "free" version that has ads instead. Most companies could go 100% green today and do so by charging 2-10x more for their products -- do you think people in general would pay for it? It works on some scale, but not in general. So its not as simple as the business doing the right thing and business owners paying the costs. Its about forcing all business to adhere to some regulation, and pass the same cost on to customers in the same way, to achieve some hopefully laudable goal. And that's totally fine in my opinion, but it breaks down when people assume there are no costs passed on to customers, and (again to @bradleyjg's ponit) that you can merely make owners pay it without any knock on effect. Recognizing the costs and how policy works helps voters to push for the right ones IMHO.