Comment by gobdovan
9 hours ago
In EU, it's politician > industrialist >>> EU citizen > outsiders.
It's almost never only about consumers. Via tech regulations, they protect European incumbents first in effect. They see US is ahead and make laws to destroy their moats. If Apple was in EU, you wouldn't have saw universal usb-c, because it would have hurt an EU company. But the more you look at how tedious is for a non-EU company to sell to EU customers, the exemptions they don't get, the specialists fees they got to put on the table, you'll see EU is more coherently described as protectionist than pro-consumer.
First of all - if it was true then it wouldn’t be much worse than US or China.
But in general, people usually complain the exact opposite of what you’re saying - that the regulations we have handicap our companies.
They handicap our little companies more than the incumbents. The Commission itself acknowledged that regulatory costs affect SMEs proportionally more than bigger competitors [0] and the OECD explicitly found that policy failures and regulatory barriers tend to hurt startups more than incumbents [1][2]. The way I see the broader pattern is: more regulation -> larger bureaucracy -> larger bureaucracy has more scope and more incentive to regulate -> incumbent absorb growing compliance burden easily -> entrants get hit harder + ad-hoc regulations to hurt established outsiders even harder.
[0] TOOL #22. THE "SME TEST": https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/5d2011d7-5470...
[1] No Country for Young Firms? https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/no-country-for-young-fi...
[2] OECD, about Germany 2025, e.g.: 'Industrial and labour market policies have tended to favour incumbents and hampered the reallocation of resources to young and innovative firms, weighing on allocative efficiency and slowing down structural change' (https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...)