Comment by Aerroon
7 months ago
The trouble is that governments might not have a bias towards any company, but the government employees doing everything do. If the government is handing out a lot of assistance then you get a layer of middlemen who will help companies "get things done". The issue with this is that they are an additional burden that suck out resources from the system.
I think on balance there's a net gain in value. Enabling new companies to navigate burdensome regulation contributes to the economy in the long run. If money is a problem big companies who made the regulation necessary with their ill behaviour can subsidise the entry of competitors. I think people are starting to call that "coopertition" as a idea somewhere between taxation and corporate social responsibility.
One of the major things governments should be doing and largely aren't is publishing open source software (e.g. BSD license) for regulatory compliance. Not just a tax filing website, the actual rules engine that some government lawyers have certified as producing legally-compliant filings.
The point being to allow members of the public to submit a pull request and have their contributions incorporated into the officially-certified codebase if it's accepted, so the code ends up being actually good because the users (i.e. the public) are given the opportunity to fix what irks them.