Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. Good regulation IMO looks bad because you never hear of anyone being punished for breaking it because it is complied with.
The EU banned roaming charges in 2017. Most networks by then had already abolished them, but only because this change was coming. The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.
EU flight compensation rules are another great example - they don’t pay out often because what’s happened is the airlines don’t get delayed to that point as often as they used to.
Scotland has a “right to roam”, which can be summarised as “don’t be a dick and you can go anywhere you want outdoors”. So you can walk, camp etc pretty much anywhere (it’s a bit more complex). In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields. In practice, this means that most popular walking paths have access routes maintained by landowners that people use.
On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
!00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is. The article points out areas that improvements to regulation, and process, would help and that second part 'and process' is often overlooked. A complex regulatory structure may be needed but that doesn't mean it has to be as hard as it is. Is it really the problem that the regulations were complex or was it a problem that navigating them was a challenge? I've had this discussion with local permitting where I live. Permits are needed, but that doesn't mean they should be hard or that the job of the city is to just tell you no. There is a world where the city is a partner trying to help you achieve something so when permitting comes up, and you pay your fees, the answer they give isn't just 'yes/no' but 'you may want to consider' and 'let's work together on a plan that...'. There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive. A similar view of how to improve federal regulations, through simple process improvement and not just regulatory change, could really make a difference.
Sure, but sometimes a repealing a bad piece of regulation doesn’t necessitate a replacement.
Policy reform decisions need to be evidence based and sometimes evidence suggests ditching the law over updating. And sometimes it’ll say update it.
What makes Good regulation is path dependent (in respect to existing institutions) and context sensitive, it’s important to analysis the costs of enforcement, not just the administrative side but in terms of lost opportunities. Do they make a suite of desirable economic activity infeasible or unjustifiable more expensive (relative to the goal of the policy)
> There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive
Are those binding constraints? If so it’s effectively regulation or part of the regulatory regime even if they aren’t the rules themselves
I was typing that in the shower, but a more complete version of "Do they make a suite of desirable economic activity infeasible or unjustifiable more expensive (relative to the goal of the policy)" is
Does the added benefit or reduced cost of the law outsize any cost or lost benefit from the introduction of the law? This question isn't always asked and in many cases it's only asked after someone picks up on a problem well after the fact.
Understandably you can't always wait for measurements to come in to evaluate a policy, it's also a political environment in which these decisions are made. That fact also leads to reactionary regulation as its the easiest way for leaders to show they're responding to a problem.
Having the ability to gather evidence to assess policy in a timely manner is actually pretty hard without some kind of history of research in the space, and you need to develop institutions that help answer these questions faster and with some level of independence from the government to demonstrate a level of legitimacy. Even in a scenario where evidence continues to come in, saying "the existing legislation is unideal", you'll have people with who have made a living out of the existing regime defend that status quo. And the longer that legislation is in place the harder it will be to challenge those people as they will only become more organised as time goes on, but in a democracy all you need is the people by and large on your side, but an organised beneficiary of the status quo will definitely not go down without a fight.
It's very difficult to generalise stuff like this.
I guess I don’t stand directly underneath while typing, occasionally wipe water droplets off the screen, and ask myself if I should wrap up my shower first
> 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer
Sometimes it is. For example some countries had or have regulation that only nobles can work in specific professions or wear specific clothes or live in specific places. Some had the same but race-based.
This entire class of regulation deserved to be thrown out. And yes, at least partially there are claims how it was necessary for safety or whatever else.
There are are also some dumb taxes with bad side effects like tax on windows.
Some regulation is terrible and deserves to be removed rather than replaced or improved.
I think you may be misinterpreting the point. It's not that we never need less regulation, this may be the case. We should never make 'less regulation' the target. The right regulation may be less in some cases.
Harm reduction (a good reason for regulation) also needs to be balanced with it.
But piles of regulation have costs - both in reduction of competitiveness, increasing expenses, reducing willingness of people to follow and support it and so on.
Regulation is bad, just it is often less bad than alternatives.
But reducing amount of regulation is a good goal.
Otherwise you end in situation where you need lawyer to understand anything, you are not allowed to throw torn socks into garbage and general population applauds people breaking law and happily support it.
"Less regulation is a good target" is only true under regimes where good faith outcomes can be expected without regulation. Given the frequency with which financial incentives align with undesirable outcomes there's no evidence to support this idea.
Say someone silly makes a rule that your need X hours of training annually to be an interior decorator. Now besides the training, you also have to know that that's required, you have to maintain records to prove you've had the training, the government needs a process for verifying that you've had the training, ...
If correct/moral/societally beneficial behavior was the most profitable then no regulation would be needed.
Lacking regulation also has a cost, it's just not to the unregulated. Dumping waste into a river is cheap for the business doing the dumping, but has environmental impacts on everyone downstream. It's more expensive to properly dispose of or recycle waste material, that's why a regulation that you must do that is needed.
The market simply does not hold bad actors accountable in any meaningful way. As a result, it pays to be a bad actor.
It's simply not a black and white issue. There are bad regulations to be sure. But it's not nearly as simple as saying that less regulation is better or that more regulation is better. The right amount is good and the wrong amount is bad. What that amount is is up for debate.
This applies also to enacting monstrously stupid regulations. Or even ones that were introduced entirely as revenge or to create opportunity for corruption.
That all sounds good, we just need to make sure "X" is reasonable. Having reassurance that any licensed decorator had an amount of training/testing is good for the customer.
Unfortunately your silly rule is something that exists (not for interior decorators of course) but for countless other trade jobs (barber, plumber, etc). Whether that's good or bad I can't say
I personally see it as good. Why wouldn't I want someone I trust with my hair or pipes to not have something to vouch for them?
It's only a downside if you see cost as the most important thing about all else. The clear consequence is that a trained barber/plumber will require higher compensation to make up for the training, and due to less supply since not everyone will be able to get a license.
It's unambiguously good, and that's coming from the perspective of someone who is routinely frustrated by regulations around residential plumbing and electrical work. It would be utterly insane to remove minimum credential and testing requirements from trades where fucking up results in catastrophic damage to a structure, fires, etc.
Note that I am not saying that "throw away regulation, always less regulation is better".
That would be asking to drop all regulations.
I am saying that regulations have cost so you should have as little as regulation as possible to achieve wanted effect.
And wanted effect often should not be literally zero of accidents or bribery or corruption. As it may be either impossible to achieve or extra side effects not worth it past certain point.
In other words minimisation of how much regulations you have should be one of targets.
What we "we need" is less corruption, this means better educations, educations that actually teach the secondary considerations of why these regulations exist, and how many corruptions they prevent. Then that education should continue with how our over regulated situation is caused by not teaching critical analysis such that these corruptions look like a good idea at all, they become exploited, and the end result is over regulation.
Or will education make things worse by teaching groups how to use corruption to create even more regulations that benefits them against everything else.
>by teaching groups how to use corruption to create even more regulations
more people who learn corruption is massively outbalanced by more people who will be civilly active and realize "this is bad for us, let's vote him out". As it is now, they simply trick the non-active people into thinking their corruption is good. See: 2024 national US elections.
I tend to be in the camp that educating people in general is better than not; we've been trying the "educate people in narrow silos" approach, but that creates a really gullible population. Which is kind of why things are in such a mess.
I feel this is exactly the same as efficiency. It isn't that we want inefficient solutions. But aiming for efficiency as a target often produces perverse incentives.
Based on your opinion of local permitting I have a strong suspicion you've never applied for any sort of local permit for something where issuance of the permit requires any real consideration.
Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax in disguise. They don't care, they were never gonna tell you no. They just want your money and want you to make work for whatever trade is being made work for in the process.
Go for a variance and then see how you feel about it. Better yet, go try and create any sort of occupied structure or commercial use where one doesn't already exist.
Local permitting is riddled with bike shedding, people trying to avoid responsibility, people trying to advance their pet interests at other people's cost and probably more stuff I'm forgetting. At least with state level stuff you can be all "I've paid my engineer big bucks, here's there work output, here's why it's GTG, and if it is in fact GTG they typically rubber stamp it. But little guys can't afford to play in that arena unfortunately.
>Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax in disguise.
Where I live, in California, that's a direct response to a state constitutional amendment that strangled property taxes (and pretty much any other taxes). Because permits are fee-for-service, they're not considered a tax in the same way, and can be increased freely. Permitting costs ballooned predictably.
So, yes, it's literally a tax in disguise, because, ironically, we've over regulated municipalities abilities to raise tax revenue in the most straightforward, fair, intuitive way possible, so every service has to pay for itself or find a weird oblique source of revenue, and services pursued by people with money (such as modifying a property you owned) get to pay for other things too.
I am actively trying to work on non-legislated ways of improving the permitting process for my local city. I have met with builders and city officials and I have done a review of programs in other cities (comparable and larger) to find programs that help get to yes and how the city can support them. Key are things like pre-approved plans and builder workshops. What I have found so far is this is 99% communication, or lack there of, and almost no actual bad actors actively trying to create harm. I think approaches like this can go a long way to helping. Basically, if we keep the conversation only at 'regulations need to be changed' then we are missing a huge opportunity to actually address the problems people are really having.
This literally doesn't disagree with its parent comment at all from my point of view. You're describing badly implemented or corruptly designed regulations which cause inficiencies. I think everyone here is agreeing those are a problem.
Couldn't brashness or naive certainty (whether correlated with youth or not) also lead to... this article? Where a founder is _so sure_ his startup is so amazing and virtuous that it uniquely deserves to bypass the regulations that were put in place by older people for good reasons the founder doesn't yet understand?
The costs he's complaining about, the costs of compliance, are costs he wishes he could externalize onto all of us, like they used to before those regulations existed.
Isn't the purpose of many regulations to stop people who are wrong from harming themselves and others? That is, the experience of being wrong also teaches respect for rules one doesn't understand.
Which purpose do you mean? Stated purpose? Intended purpose? Regulators’ purpose? Legislators’ purpose? Donors’ and other special interests’ purpose? Harm as defined by whom? The field of public-choice economics rests on the insight that employees of agencies and bureaus act in their own self-interest, which is not always the same as the public interest.
That is claimed, but often the real purpose is to stop people who otherwise could do something from taking that work away from whatever group created the regulation.
Which is why I can't legally replace my water heater - a simple job that I've done myself several times in other cities. Or lots of other basic home maintenance. (I grew up in a house built by a plumber, and my current house was owned by a builder before me - so I have plenty of first hand experience with how bad trades can do their own work)
That’s horrible that you legally cannot replace your own water heater. What region mandates that?
Where I live I can replace my own water heater, but it’s more cost-effective not to because the most reliable brands will only sell to licensed plumbers. So I can get a big box store model that will leak or die in 3 years for $300, and then have to pay for fittings, wiring, etc. myself and pay to dispose of the old one and provide my own labor, or pay a plumber buddy of mine who has access to the good stuff that will last 10-15 years $1000 to install one for me.
Building permits and inspections make sense in a lot of cases for things that could cause societal damage. E.g. if I wire my house wrong and it burns down, it could kill the people living in it (even if it’s not me) or set my neighbor’s house on fire. If I put in a septic system wrong it could poison all the wells in the area. But when you start needing permit and inspections for basic maintenance, it becomes difficult to justify the regulations.
My vibes on the community are the exact opposite, actually. Even if it leads towards the same conclusion. Older folk who lived in an industry completely unregulated and saw it rise into a trillion dollar empire. No government involved (or at least, that's what it looks like on the surface).
Unfortunately, most industries cannot cheaply and quickly break things to iterate upon it like code. moving fast and breaking buildings costs lives.
I suspect there's a similar mentality here with regards to unionization. Many older folk will only have seen the riches of tech and not the abuse of labor in nearly every other sector.
A giant helping of hubris may be a factor in this tendency. ‘Programming a computer is thrilling enough; imagine programming an entire country of people!’
Those who think this way need to read Bastiat: “Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!”
Save perhaps unqualified kings who inherited the throne at too young an age and under unstable circumstances no demographic has run more societies off cliffs than "comfortable professionals".
Seriously, go read about the run up to europe's religious wars of the 1500s or the french revolution.
You’re possibly right that HN is young, but in that case you’re missing how the circumstances of their youth and young adulthood have made them wary of deregulation in the macro sense.
I guess I'm "young" as someone in their 30's. but I was raised around regulations being loosened and seeing corruption flow as a result. So I'm wary anytime someone suggests "we need less regulations!" when they only have to gain from working faster and treating human lives as an accounting detail.
>Someone please tell me we are not living in a time where the kids are pro-regulation
Hard to say. I'm not really "old" nor "young" per se. I'm a late millenial so I probably have pieces of both millenial and Gen Z in my experience. I'd love to know how this makeup really is at large, but from my observation:
>When I was younger, the youth were anti-establishment - that was cool and rebellious.
The "Gen Z" side me me spent its life seeing my parents (late Gen X) struggle through the results of '08 where we didn't regulate banks enough, and under a ruling that basically deregulated election spending. Then I graduate into a term of a president wanted to deregulate everything and am entering part 2 of such.
The "millenial" side of me just barely escaped the explosive costs of rent and college, but still felt the beginning of that impact. And got to experience almost a decade of decent work before seeing the job market completely turn on America. Because we spent decades de-regulating collective bargaining.
So I would not be surprised if Gen Z proper does want more regulation to reel in those who exploited deregulation. But that "cool and rebellious" mentality is still there given last year. It seems they already learned the results of that rebellion, though.
> Now we need the machine to do our raging for us?
Pretty much. When minimum wage can't even cover rent, you get less time to rage yourself, outside of the ballot box.
I'm not arguing that pro-regulation is a bad stance just noting that my image of youth is wounded by thinking that the new youth are hands down in favor of it in general.
This is a silly and sad sentiment. Part of me just wants to think that some among us are crazy or naive enough to tend towards resistance. I don't blame anyone for not being so.
HN is also biased towards software developers. Now, if you start putting in regulations into everything software developers do in the software development pipeline, only then will begin to truly feel the bite of mind-numbing regulations. Until then all regulation is good - since regulations are someone else's problem.
Now, enforce multi-month/multi-year government approval for your productive projects deployments with a 100 page form in triplicate. Every re-build to production needs a root cause analysis with mitigation plan. You need to pass expensive certification and re-up every couple of years. You can only develop using regulatory approved languages and decade old compiler versions that have been certified. Breaking regulations involves removal of your license and negligence lawsuits. Tack on another few dozen regulations, so that you are forced to hire an expert consultant+lawyer to feel safe.
You will see the opinion of HN commenters change like magic. Basically software developers will always support BIG SLOW NANNY for other engineers. Until BIG SLOW NANNY stomps them hard, they won't change their position.
Excellent comment. I'll also add that many HN commenters, even those with a great deal of experience, have never worked on projects that are mission critical, safety critical, or where loss of life is a possible consequence of failure. They've never been in industries where regulations are written in past victims' blood.
> !00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is.
Well, much of the time the right regulation is 'let existing general laws (eg around safety and fraud) and contract law and private agreements handle it'.
But it's pretty fair to sum that Right Regulation up as 'less regulation'.
To give a crazy example: the Right Regulation about the colour of your underwear is to just let you decide what you want to wear, also known as no regulation of the colour of your underwear.
We've had an example all year of why that's a pretty horrible idea. At least, why it's bad for the general public to let private aggreements run rampant.
Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.
Aviation is still one of the most heavily regulated areas in the country, though, and its excellent safety record is due to the practices adopted within that regulatory environment.
If the FAA were to disappear tomorrow, I guarantee with absolute, utter certainty, that aviation's safety performance would drop--in some cases over time, in some cases, overnight. I would bet any amount of money on that.
That is not obvious, and evidence in the airline industry shows that deregulation did not lead to the catastrophe you claim it will, but will make things better.
Regional and commercial jets cost tens and hundreds of millions of USD. The greediest caricature capitalist will want to protect this investment. Their insurers will demand certain terms to accept the risk of having to replace such a costly asset. Our greedy capitalist villain wants repeat business. Dead customers don’t pay again. Lawsuits are costly. Their friends and family will be reluctant to book fares with airlines they perceive as being unsafe. “Qantas never crashed.”
This just isn't true even in the already regulated environment.
It is "irrational" for a "greedy" slaveowner to kill their slave, a significant monetary investment sometimes, and yet it happened all the time, because capital owners are not rational.
A significant fraction of aviation fatalities can be traced directly back to those "greedy capitalist villains" actually completely cutting corners to save a penny and losing million dollar aircraft.
Business owners are not rational actors, they are gamblers.
None of this is true. A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else. Every cost of their business that's possible to externalize will be externalized. Every corner will be cut in the name of marginally better profits.
For example, you say lawsuits are costly. To a company, that's meaningless. The only question is, is the cost of a lawsuit greater than the money saved cutting corners? If not, it's better to kill people and deal with the lawsuits: [1].
Moreover, companies are still run by people, and people have biases. Most notable of which is the short-term thinking bias that results in companies irrationally optimizing for short-term gains, compromising long-term ones. And what fits perfectly into that trap? Yep, safety. Do you know how much money you could save by delaying maintenance? Lots, lots of money to be had right now vs a nebulous concept of potentially higher chance of an accident at some uncertain point in the future. The monkey with its primitive brain chooses the immediate reward every time.
> A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else.
You probably meant public companies because otherwise this sentence and rest of your comment do not reflect reality.
According to [0] (2019), 90% of (6.1m) businesses have < 10 employees. Lawsuits are a very big deal to these enterprises. They are not out to kill people for marginal profits.
I will take the other side of the bet. I offer you 1 to 10000 odds that, if the FAA disappears or otherwise becomes defunct, that the airline safer would be broadly agreed to be marginally safer 100 years afterwards.
I know where you are going with this. The FAA is indeed a burden when it comes to bringing new technology to market, including safety-critical technology. The cost of new tech and safety improvements would indeed go down without regulation, but on the balance, would all the other deep cost-cutting measures that airlines, manufacturers, airports, ATC would invoke actually result in increased safety overall? I'm not going to live 100 years so we'll never know, but I'm absolutely confident that it won't given how every other business in every other under-regulated industry sacrifices everything for the sake of profits.
I'm actually just taking the very outside view on this. I cannot think of any industry which has both existed for 100 years and would not be called safer today than it was 100 years ago. The closest I get are industries which stopped existing entirely because new industries supplanted them, but even there the argument is suspect. This seems to be a general trend regardless of the amount of regulation applied to the industry.
I think you might be unaware of the various regulations that are driving all of these other non-aviation industries towards better safety. Not only that, but liability and insurance claims also drive safety measures, which are also enabled by workman's comp and other regulations). I'm having trouble imagining a single company policy around safety (either for workers or customers) that is not ultimately driven by government involvement or the legal system.
I never claimed anything about company safety policies. Let's keep separate the concept of an industry becoming safer from whatever policies those companies officially adopt after rounds of writing and rewriting.
To wit, three prominent examples of industries frontrunning safety advances well in advance of any regulation around them. One: In the late 19th century, early electrification was burning cities down. Private insurance companies banded together to form the Underwriter's Laboratory to test products, refusing to insure buildings that didn't use UL-listed devices. Manufacturers voluntarily submitted to rigorous safety testing not because the police would arrest them, but because it got them access to insurance at a considerably lower cost.
Two: In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seatbelt. Volvo gave the patent away voluntarily to all competitors, partly to establish a brand identity of safety and innovation, and partly because they genuinely recognized that seatbelts saved lives. If your claims were right, Volvo would have either kept the patent to monopolize safety or, worse, buried it to save manufacturing costs. Instead, the market rewarded them for being the "safe car," and other manufacturers had to follow suit to compete, decades before seatbelt laws became universal.
Three: There currently exists almost no federal law governing recreational scuba diving in the United States. Yet, the industry is obsessed with safety. Shops by and large will not fill your tank without a C-card. The PADI and the NAUI update their standards constantly. If tourists started drowning en masse, in a sport virtually custom designed to do so, the industry would vanish. They self-regulate to preserve their market cap.
With all that, let's return to the claim you are endorsing. You say you are "absolutely confident", >99.99%, that the FAA's dissolution would lead an entire industry to be less safe a century from now. This seems like, at minimum, a lack of imagination regarding how markets solve coordination problems. You are assuming that in the absence of the FAA, a vacuum would remain. History suggests the opposite. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that without a shield of regulatory compliance to hide behind in court, liability pressures might actually make airlines more risk-averse, not less.
> Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
I wrote about this in the past, but the TLDR is that it’s anywhere between extremely tough to impossible to do it. The TLDR is that modern tech systems are so many and so advanced that only engineers of the company can truly understand it.
Ah yes, the best thing for society is surely to take the power from private people and businesses and to centralize it in government bureaucracy. Then only a small handful of people get to decide how we live! Along with the threat of imprisonment or violence if we don’t comply! Such a great idea.
Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their own accord, that’s ultimately what they’ll do. In many cases that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others, creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on.
Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive.
That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical.
I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.
It's a double edged sword. It creates a floor but also lowers the ceiling so a company can't lock out competitors through brute force. it's best to introduce such regulation before we have to worry about monopolies, though.
Yes, and a distinct feature are pressure groups funded by corporations drumming up fake issues in order to get regulations passed that remove the competitors to those corporations.
The sidelining of tort law also didn't help one bit.
So we're going to ignore the pressure groups who are deregulating in real time to tear down regulations that also remove competitors to those corporations? Or is it okay to be anti-competitive when it helps you get paid?
Well in contrast to the enterprises which can survive free competition, those which rely on regulations to survive receive rents for which no corresponding benefit to consumers can be recovered. This is what rentseeking is.
There is a very big difference between succeeding against competition because you're able to deliver a cheaper or better product, as in free competition, and succeeding because a government decree happens to exclude your product from certain liabilities that your competitors aren't excluded from.
This is the Schoolhouse Rock version that ignores the real phenomenon of regulatory capture, formalized by Stigler way back in 1971.
“We propose the general hypothesis: every industry or occupation that has enough political power to utilize the state will seek to control entry. In addition, the regulatory policy will often be so fashioned as to retard the rate of growth of new firms.”
You’re never gonna get these people to understand basic economics if they don’t already. It’s mindblowing people do not understand that more regulation = more red tape = less competition as the only companies that can afford to do business in that environment are the ones already in power with resources. Taxation and regulation genuinely only further embed those in power. Ironically, most leftists that advocate for more taxation and regulation in an effort to help the poor and working classes seem to have no grasp of economic realities at all.
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones. While enforcement was not strong specially for small companies, basically any company could be sued for non compliance -- and many were. I guess this was bad regulation because it wasn't strict and clear enough. It should have been clear that cookie banners must had 2 buttons: agree and disagree. None of that bullshit of selecting partners. None of that "disagreeing takes longer to save your preferences" or refreshes the whole page, or sends you to the home page. And if you didn't want to comply, you're free to block European traffic.
> Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones.
The question here isn't if it cost companies money. It did. It's whether it was a good law. It wasn't, because compliance generated no benefit to anyone.
You seem to be saying that it was a good law because it could have been a good law if written differently.
>because compliance generated no benefit to anyone.
if you don't value privacy over an extra click or two, then I can see why you'd think that. But if that's the case we wouldn't also be so adamant against mass surveillance. Which is it?
Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to various degrees.
At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at some point the collective burden would be too high.
Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for a regulation to be supported.
The textbook ideal regulation is zero in the same way that a textbook ideal operating system costs no ram, takes no cpu cycles, or consumes and disk space.
Reality is more complicated. And once you incur the cost of reality there's probably some things that you should bundle with it for convenience and consistency.
Every regulation has a cost, even the good ones. The biggest cost is that they slow down the ability of people and companies to do business, which come out as a lower economic growth. Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence.
Some regulation is fine, but it should be really a fraction of what we currently have in Europe.
(Somewhat unrelated, but the EU's situation reminds me of "The End of Eternity" by Asimov, sans the time traveling)
>Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence.
Meamwhile, US's GDP exploded and the bust cycles are more or less screwing over 2 generations from such gains. GDP is completely divorced from how the people are doing these days.
> The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.
Even better, a lot of the MVNOs added nothing or far less in roaming charges. I think its purely because they have more price sensitive customers. In general people seem very reluctant to switch providers despite number portability, the right to unlock phones after a certain time, etc.
Roaming charges are far from the only example. The big operators are sometimes several times as expensive for the same package (the Vodafone equivalent to my 1p mobile packages is approx three times the price, even ignoring roaming costs) so clearly just do not need to compete on price.
One problem with getting good regulation is the influence of the currently dominant players. They are adept at lobbying to twist regulation to strengthen their position and maintain the status quo. We see a lot of this in IT, of course, but it happens elsewhere too.
The EU removing roaming is better than the situation in the UK. Although some operators (O2 I know of) give a fixed roaming allowance in the EU that is OK. Not as good as getting your full contract/PAYG allowance though.
eSIMs have made the virtual mobile operators attractive for short term data usage. Switzerland not being in the EU has very high roaming charges, but you can buy data on an eSIM for not terrible prices. Much better than standard network roaming data charges for sure.
eSIMs help with outgoing calls and data, but people need incoming calls and SMSs too so still get gouged on price.
EU roaming is only a partial solution, as your example of Switzerland. The moment you set foot outside the EU you get gouged.
Interestingly a number of British operators do provide cheap or free roaming to Switzerland. Vodafone has free roaming to a few European countries, mostly non-EU. So the situation in the UK might be better depending on where you are going, which operator you use, whether you are making phone calls or using data.....
This is interesting because I would have guessed that most people would have had broadly similar changes in price to the MVNO I use but just proportion to already higher prices. IN fact, the entire structure is different, and which countries are free/cheap/expensive is entirely different too.
The underlying problem is that these are heavily bundled goods with complex price structures so the operators always find a way to make an excessive profit - very likely an abnormal profit although I have not looked at the numbers I would need to confirm that.
Incoming calls work with a $3 eSIM since I receive calls fine with WiFi based calling, perfect example of the free market (Apple) solving a problem instead of trying to use a maze of government regulations to do the same thing while hampering the progress of technology.
The fixed allowance is the same within the EU. It's not "no roaming charges", but it is that you must not be charged for occasional fair-use roaming (which is quite a lot of roaming). They can still ban you from roaming if you are living in a different country from your contract provider - you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and then move to Denmark.
> you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and then move to Denmark.
You'd be surprised: I picked up a French SIM when I was on holiday there years ago on a very competitive package (including on roaming)... it's still working and I have been living full-time abroad.
Is it "allowed"? Probably not. What are they gonna do about it, cut me off? Well godspeed and thanks for the years of cheap data.
If only they removed roaming. Roaming charges are an absurdity since the internet exists and that is how mobile operators run their backend. They should be outlawed fully.
Its somewhat complicated by countries that still have high pricing on international calls imposed by regulators, and by pricing differences between country.
It might be possible for a regulator to say something such as prices should not exceed a price set comparative to the operator you are using, or not more than what it coses your operator plus a percentage.
Tomato, tomato. I think the problem is, much like Google engineers get promoted by shipping features (even if no one uses them), politicians get ahead by shipping laws, even if they're ineffective or cause more harm than good, so long as they can convince enough voters that it was a good thing (hence the proliferation of bills with names like Ultra-Triple-Plus-Good-For-The-Children-Act").
A regulation being good or bad is not a fixed thing. A regulation that was good when created could change to bad due to circumstances or new innovation introduced.
Maybe something innovators can learn to do better is to involve regulators earlier in the design process of this innovation process, so that regulation does not become the bottleneck for introducing the innovation to the market.
The tricky thing about involving regulators earlier is that it sometimes can be seen as aggressive or unethical lobbying.
A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the government.
So many of these SV entrepreneurs are great at designing systems and processes, and great at finding creative solutions to complex problems.
If we all thought of `designing great regulation` as something to aspire to, then we'd see a bunch of interesting HN discussions around the details of new policy, predictions around their effects, etc.
Instead you get these extremely shallow articles that read like a sullen teenager complaining about how they didn't get what they wanted and a comment section discussing whether or not `regulations==bad`.
I'm dying to find a community of engineers who have good-faith, informed discussions about policy. If anyone knows of such a group or place, please let me know.
> A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the government.
This is strongly aided by plenty of examples of regulations that just get in the way of people who know how to do something.
And I think the winds are changing when seeing examples of deregulation that instead make the people's lives worse instead of better. The people who "know how to do something" sure aren't using it for the public good.
Whether it's propaganda or not, it is a good heuristic supported by nuanced policy analysis. The switch to more knee-jerk sympathy towards regulation, on the other hand, has much more to do with propaganda than with any kind of credible analysis.
About the cookie banners, I'm honestly not sure it's a regulation issue.
For >90% of the websites the "reject all" option have no impact on user experience, so either everybody is breaching or the banner is useless in the first place.
Do you get prompted for the choice the next time you visit the website? Are they websites you need to log in to? Those are really the only user experience things that would be obvious in most instances — everything else is just pure data mining for usage analytics (::knowing wink::) and overt tracking. Some sites absolutely do not respect any of the choices, but that’s not the normal behavior.
"Bad" regulation just raises the question what would be better for all concerned. Sometimes that means reducing the weight and impact of a concern (redefining the problem), but more often it means a different approach or more information.
In this case, pumping first-ever possible toxins into the ground could be toxic, destructive, and irreversible, in ways that are hard to test or understand in a field with few experts. The benefit is mainly a new financial quirk, to meet carbon accounting with uncertain gains for the environment. It's not hard to see why there's a delay, which would only be made worse with an oppositional company on a short financial leash pushing the burden back onto regulators.
The regulation that needs attention is not the unique weird case, but the slow expansion of under-represented, high-frequency or high-traffic - exactly like the cellular roaming charges or housing permits or cookies. It's all-too-easy to learn to live with small burdens.
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
While I agree that cookie banners are bad, they are not the result of bad regulation. They work perfectly for what they are. They signal that the web page is tracking you and has tracking cookies. Essential cookies are allowed and do not trigger a cookie banner requirement.
On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
The problem with this is that DNT header is used by such a tiny minority of people that it’s basically a walking unique identifier for all of the side channels. Arguably it’s as identifying as the cookie you’re asking them not to store in the first place.
This is such a tired HN cliche response and it comes up as a negative whenever people mention things that actually improve users privacy, even ad blockers.
It honestly boils down to this:
If some website is breaking GDPR regulations, sure, you might get somehow fingerprinted. (EDIT: Because, surprise, fingerprinting also requires consent under GDPR!)
But for websites actually following the law, DNT is effective at best, ignored at worst. Because fingerprinting is also PII.
Sure: saying "people might fingerprint you" is technically correct. But virtually everything else in your browser, from the size in pixels of your browser tab to your IP address can be used for fingerprinting by malicious actors.
So yeah, if you have to use TOR (which actually has actual anti-fingerprinting measures), go ahead and remove the DNT bit. If you don't need TOR, get an ad-blocker ASAP so it at least protects you from AdWare and Tracking stuff that might fingerprint you.
> This is such a tired HN cliche response and it comes up as a negative whenever people mention things that actually improve users privacy, even ad blockers.
We’re talking about regulation here. Some things (like ad blockers) are a unanimous win for privacy but have nothing to do with regulation.
> If some website is breaking GDPR regulations, sure, you might get somehow fingerprinted.
The ePrivacy Directive (cookie law) has nothing to do with GDPR. The directive only deals with cookies, and informed consent for the cookies. If the goal is to improve privacy it’s a failure because it doesn’t touch any of the other numerous ways that tracking happens. If it’s to improve how websites handle cookies then it’s succeeded there I guess, but to what end?
GDPR on the other hand is a better attempt. It’s not perfect but it actually gets to the heart of it. GDPR changed behaviours, the cookie law slapped a banner in front of half the western world and continued as things were.
Your post that I replied to was about fingerprinting caused by DNT.
This has nothing to do with ePrivacy. Websites don't get to "follow one regulation but not another", so if you fingerprint someone and create an ID that can identify someone, that's PII. If you don't get consent, you're breaking GDPR, period, regardless of following ePrivacy or not.
Once again: the DNT header is only an issue for fingerprinting and side-channels on website that DON'T follow GDPR.
I mentioned ad blocking because anti-ad-blocking posts here also mention the same concern about "ad blocking helping fingerprinting".
If the pro-regulation side refuses to admit that cookie banners are bad regulation, then engaging with these True Believers is a complete waste of time.
> On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
They come as disabled because that is required by GDPR. All settings that are not strictly necessary, consent must be opt-in. Not because you enabled DNT. That's just a flag companies don't care about because they are not legally required to care.
Nope. I don't live in a country covered by GDPR. They used to come enabled before. OneTrust's banners also show a little green text reading "Your signal to opt-out has been honored".
>They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever
If it was implemented a decade earlier before Web 2.0, it would have been effective suppression given what we know of click through rates. Adding an extra click (even if most agree) would just turn people to the competition.
in 2017 though, a lot of the internet already consolidated to a dozen websites, which were too sticky to let a button disrupt them. It wasn't strong enough for the new environment.
Frankly, the cookie banners are an example of bad enforcement. Most of the annoying ones are actually non-compliant with the regulation. I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
I disagree - I think they’re a bad law. Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal’s questions was “are there any cookies”, to which we said yes. We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means cookie bar.
> I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
Personally I’ve never looked at a cookie bar and said “wow I’m glad I now know how many people they’re selling my data too” and then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to justify what they were already doing. That’s a bad regulation.
> Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it
The non-compliance is a result of the lack of enforcement. If it went into effect and a few fines were handed down the next day for non-compliant consent flows, you can bet everyone else would quickly go into compliance.
But that effectively never happened, and the probability of getting fined for a non-compliant consent flow appears to be less than winning the lottery, so of course everyone just ignores the regulation.
Agreed 100%. "Enforcement" of the law has gotten so bleak that people can't imagine a world where we have to follow the laws as they are now.
Imagine a world where activity like this was fined, or where the police actually persecuted white collar criminals. A world where politicians and corporations were both afraid to engage in open corruption. Where companies got fined for uncompetitive practices and weren't able to pollute the environment or engage in union busting.
We wouldn't need any new laws to live in a world like that. We would just need the "enforcement" wing of the government to actually be effective and do thier jobs
In your case you wouldn't have needed a popup/bar.
In all other cases, a "Decline All" option should be a the most prominent option (or defaulted to would be fine). The current implementations are either non-compliant (if hiding the decline option behind more clicks than the "Accept All" option), or malicious compliance in making their own products worse to shift blame to regulations, because the unregulated previous status quo was extremely user exploitative on tracking data. Of course (exploitative) companies would like to continue selling data on top of whatever their main business supposedly is.
No company needs a cookie bar, unless they have no other business than selling user data.
Good rules will have their intent followed by bad lawyers. Bad rules will have their letter followed but their intent missed.
Most lawyers aren’t bad, they’re just risk averse. I’ve had very few outright “no” answers from legal, even when pushing the boundaries in the grey areas, but the result of that is the PM doesn’t get a straight yes from legal so they decide to take the most complicit option. In the cookie banners case, that’s show by default especially if you don’t understand.
My experience with GDPR lawyers is that they treat every "cookie" as requiring consent purely because of lack of information and difficulty in fully assessing the full picture.
In every other field, lawyers have to work together with experts. Technical experts must engage with the lawyers. This here is a failure from both sides.
Apple is ahead of the curve[1]. You get a system-level popup asking you for consent to be tracked. Actual, not implied consent - only "yes" means "yes".
So you say "no" and it means "no". Apps are blocked from all basic forms of tracking (like device ID), and the App Store rules state that apps that try to circumvent that will be kicked out. Apple doesn't fuck around - they've kicked Meta and Epic without blinking an eye.
EU's response? Kick Apple, because EU companies can no longer do targeted advertising on Apple's platform. Our regulators are full of shit.
[1]: Well Apple still tracks you in their first-party apps, but that's a different story.
>EU's response? Kick Apple, because EU companies can no longer do targeted advertising on Apple's platform
I guess if you ignore the 3 years of non-compliance and feet dragging on tangential cases, you can say that. That's like saying "Fortnite made apple and what was their respones? Kick Epic from their platform".
The EU courts don't just let that fly like in the US.
It wasn’t the EU, it was France who fined Apple over ATT (although there are ongoing discussions at the EU level).
They were fined for self-preferencing, which is exactly the “different story” in your footnote.
It was also pointed out that consenting to ATT still isn't sufficient to provide informed consent required under GDPR and is misleading for implementers who think they can just rely on ATT (its effectively yet another non-compliant cookie banner), but the fine was just for the self-preferencing.
> Apple doesn't fuck around - they've kicked Meta and Epic without blinking an eye.
Sorry what?
Everyone lies on those "privacy nutrition labels" on the App Store listings and gets away with it, and everyone is free to embed dozens of analytics/tracking SDKs in their app that track the user by fingerprinting and IP address.
Apple doesn't care. If Apple cared, they could simply say that all apps must comply with the laws of the locale they are distributed in - which they do for things like copyright infringement, etc - and thus ban Meta and most their competitors all the way back in 2018 when the GDPR went into effect. But they didn't.
I am sympathetic to your claim but after reading the article it does seem to be a case of overregulation, or lack of flexibility at least. Could you use the examples of the article in order to illustrate how this is bad regulatation rather than overregulation ?
To go in the direction of your claim, hasn't the FDA model often been criticized for how easy it is to comply with for medical devices/complements ?
I could have written 4x the amount on Right to Roam, but I didn't. My point is that it changes how landowners treat their land and access by default. They could provide gates and come after people for not respecting their land, but instead they (usually) provide alternative access which actually delivers the spirit of the law - a right to roam.
I'm Irish, living in Scotland, and it's just unbelieveable the difference it makes. Here [0] is a perfect example of a situation that this solves. Murder Hole beach (in the same ish area) has similar issues, the farmer who owned the field that you accessed it kept a bull in that field.
Most regulations are misregulation. Many regulations are malregulation.
The people who write regulations, through incompetence or malevolence it matters not which, prefer malregulation. Those that have blind faith in regulation, especially from their favored party, cheer them on and demand more. Humanity yearns to live in a world where the HOA busybody measures their grass with a ruler at 7am on a Sunday morning and noisily knocks on their door to inform them that if they do not get the extra 3/4" mowed within 48 hours a $175/day fine plus interest will apply.
Without wishing to derail from the main point, they are very easy to comply with, but they have broadly not been complied with.
Any site with PII collection where the "deny optional cookies" button isn't right there, and not deemphasized, is conducting illegal data collection. But as the enforcement is carried out by national agencies who appear not to have given any shits for a decade, everyone has been getting away with making users jump though stupid hoops (that not only are not required by the law as the sites imply, but are actually outright forbidden) like navigating a dark pattern minigame or outright cunty behaviour like making the "deny" button hang with a spinner indefinitely.
I think bad regulation and over-regulation are different words for the same thing, but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad, which people who profit from deregulation would like you to think.
> but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad
Over-regulation implies that there is an optimal level of regulation that is non-zero. It just happens in practice that people don't complain when the level is pretty good and it is unusual for something to be under-regulated because the regulators are eager beavers for regulating things. The default state when there is a regulatory problem is usually over-regulation.
Like when the thread ancestor tried to find an example of a situation moving to under-regulated the first thing that leapt to mind was roaming charges which it must be admitted is a pretty minor problem. But the first thing that leaps to mind for over-regulation is things like the article where the cost of something expensive doubled and a potentially good idea struggles to be born into the world.
Granted, this is not completely the same, but 360 000 pages is a LOT. Most civilizational infrastructure around the world was built using orders of magnitude less bureaucracy.
That is overregulation for me, and I don't think this pushes any agenda except "360 000 pages for a tunnel is freaking insane".
A distinction without almost any practical difference. If this isn’t overregulation, how would you define it? What law would you ever look at and say, “that’s overregulation”?
> Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for.
You missed a key component - Cost. It must not only work, be enforceable, but it also must cost less than alternative options and the value of the externality it's aiming to fix.
Solving ProblemA could be agreeable.
But if ProblemA causes $100 a year in problems, and the regulated fix is $110 then it's not a good regulation.
If the Regulated fix is $110 and there is a market solution for $75, then it's not good regulation.
If the regulated fix $100 but it is over-applied into 2x as many scenarios, then it's not good regulation.
Often the government loses out not in it having bad ideas, but that they break the flexibility of better options that require nuance and context to see.
So what distinguishes the good regulation from the bad? Good regulations either
1) solve collective action problems (i.e. situations in which we're all better off if we all do X but it's in nobody's immediate personal interest to do X), or
2) short circuit short term corporate hill-climbing and let us "jump" from one local economic maximum to a higher one elsewhere in configuration space without having to traverse the valley between (which corporations won't do on their own).
I think even the most hardcore objectivist types would appreciate that these classes of problem exist. Even if you delegate their solutions to some ostensibly private actor (e.g. let insurance companies make the building codes) you end up with an inescapable system of rules that's de facto state control anyway. Doesn't help.
The problem with the cookie law is that it doesn't solve a real problem. Look, I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for saying this, but the people who make "tracking" a cause celebre are a tiny, noisy minority and most real world people don't actually care. They're more annoyed by cookie dialogs than the cookies.
Policymakers overestimated the size of the privacy advocate constituency and so enacted regulations that solve a problem that exists only in the minds of diehard privacy advocates. Now, policymakers are reversing this policy. They're doing is slowly and tentatively (because they're still spooked by how loud the cookie banner people are), but they're doing it. Credit where it's due for finding their gonads.
The cookie affair isn't unique though. It's just one example of a regulation that went wrong because it came out of non-market decision making. Money is an honest, clean signal.
You know what a market is? It's a policy diffusion engine that uses profit as its loss signal. Works remarkably well almost all the time!
In those few situations in which we depart from the market as a decision making mechanism, we have to be careful not to allow ourselves to be corrupted by the usual suite of bugs in human reasoning: availability bias, recency bias, social desirability bias, and so on. The market, because money is an honest signal, resists these corruptions. Regulatory bodies? Much more vulnerable.
The cookie law is a central example of a time when a non-market regulatory apparatus was corrupted by a cognitive bias: social desirability bias in particular.
Of course we need some regulations. But when we make them, we need to be aware that we're likely getting them wrong in some way. All regulations should have
- automatic sunsets,
- public comment periods,
- judicial and legislative review mechanisms,
- variance and exception mechanisms, and
- the lightest possible touch.
Just as in software, each additional line of (legal) code is a liability, not a feature. Keep it simple.
I liked your opening here a lot, but by the time you got here:
> Money is an honest, clean signal.
I was lost. Money is neither clean nor honest, because as a signal it is based on a highly non-uniform distribution that arises substantially from processes that are not proxies for "things we collectively want". Markets reflect what those with money want, and while that theoretically could be a good proxy for collective desire, it doesn't take a particular notable GINI coefficient for that to no longer be true.
It's easy to say "keep it simple" when you don't consider that Law is a centuries, or millenia, old legacy codebase that no one has lived long enough to truly understand the whole of. Yes, there's a lot of things that don't make sense because it was written 300 years ago for something technological progress has eliminated, or because it was some niche edge case made for a specific issue that doesn't exist anymore.
We unfortunately can't just throw it out and start a new codebase like we do in tech. Or at least, I don't see much interest in that.
All regulation increases costs. It doesn't matter whether you consider it good or bad. And if you consider it good, recall that there can be too much of a good thing.
Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. Good regulation IMO looks bad because you never hear of anyone being punished for breaking it because it is complied with.
The EU banned roaming charges in 2017. Most networks by then had already abolished them, but only because this change was coming. The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.
EU flight compensation rules are another great example - they don’t pay out often because what’s happened is the airlines don’t get delayed to that point as often as they used to.
Scotland has a “right to roam”, which can be summarised as “don’t be a dick and you can go anywhere you want outdoors”. So you can walk, camp etc pretty much anywhere (it’s a bit more complex). In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields. In practice, this means that most popular walking paths have access routes maintained by landowners that people use.
On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.