I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not), but I can share how it is done in China (where package volume is orders of magnitude higher).
China identifies "choke points" most packages pass: large platforms and logistics companies. Yes, Chinese e-commerce is more centralized on Alibaba/JD/PDD etc, but there are actually much more logistics companies in China than in EU.
They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow" (well, sometimes they do, but it's a different topic). E.g. the non-degradable plastic regulation was issued in 2020 to come in effect in 2025. This gives time to prepare and implement (unlike EU border controls mess...)
So now if something is shipped in non-degradable plastic, the logistics company is fined along with the sender. This is much more scalable and easy to implement. Logistics companies might rise their prices a bit in light of expanded work scope, but it would be peanuts compared to every individual seller.
Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...
But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.
>Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...
Within EU we already pay ~€3 for packages from China. And in Austria we will soon pay additional ~€2 for every delivered package. And 20% VAT.
Edit:
I am pretty sure at least some part of these already contribute towards recycling.
The goal here is likely not just to get more funding for recycling, but rather to use materials that can be recycled in the first place. Which you cannot achieve simply by charging businesses or consumers more.
> They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow"
This wasn't introduced "from tomorrow", people had 1 year and a half to prepare for this (at least) or to protest this. See some comments below how individual countries actually messed this up.
> But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.
> I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not)
It's good that you take the time to just make assumptions about how the EU is bad based on your knowledge on how it operates...
It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.
Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time. Just try to imagine it, because that's about as close an analogy as you're going to get. Now re-evaluate your criticism in that light, and understand that comparing a single state to a collection of 27 states is more or less a non-sequitur.
> Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time.
I actually think it would be quite a bit easier than it is to create the EU. There's a lot more broad cultural homogeneity between the countries in the Americas than there is within Europe. Even on the topic of language you've got the vast majority of all peoples speaking some combination of Spanish, English, and Portuguese. And Latin America has a bit more limited geopolitical concerns than Europe does which makes managing some tensions easier than it might otherwise be.
But I'm not sure why you are considering "it's hard to create the EU" to be a defense against complaints or criticism related to the EU itself. Maybe it's hard and it won't work and the criticism is reflecting that and others are pointing out that it's a flawed task to begin with for some number of reasons. For my own part I think it has been a fascinating topic and a remarkable accomplishment of statesmanship to even get the EU to this stage, albeit like anything there are some very valid drawbacks.
And EU does it with VAT-OSS which was also separate in each country before. There's just no will to do this with EPR because there's too much money and lobbying power in the recycling cartel.
Yeah, obviously we wouldn't try to do that. Our laws, cultures, and priorities are wildly different. By this lens, the main problem seems to be that the eu expanded too much and grew too large to actually have a coherent purpose.
Per downthread, this whole crisis arises because of Chinese companies shipping to Europe. The EU Directives are definitely visible in advance, none of this is dropped on people.
I think this directive was from Feb 2025? Is 1 year enough for everyone to register in 25 different packaging regulation bodies, appoint representatives, etc etc?..
I also fail to see how this will stop Chinese companies from shipping to Europe. No Chinese company will register in this farce.
Exactly. I don't see how EU can enforce it against China, when most of the goods are imported from China. Or any other non-EU country, for that matter.
Erm I've been talking about this for 4 years now. So I'm not sure how it can "come out of nowhere" unless you're paying 0 attention to really important regulation in your field.
There will be a post in 9 months from software companies crying about the PLD and CRA because their leaders were asleep at the wheel for the last half decade.
"in your field"? All small businesses and solo enterpreneurs that I know who are hit by this are not "in this field". Their field is making jewelry or knitted toys or something similar. Now many are just not planning to ship EU wide just because it's too high risk for them.
One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated. EU will pass laws, countries will adopt those laws, but you end up with 20-24 different versions of those laws. With some countries being strict or lenient about the law that everyone agreed to. And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part. Modern technology makes it feasible, but old ideas just drags it down.
Yes. I used to sell objects on Amazon in Europe. You can sell from just one country, but then each sale outside of that country is an "export" that triggers high fees.
For sales to be "local", products need to be stored in warehouses in each country. But that in turn means the owner of said products (the seller) has to be registered for VAT in that country, and submitting annual reports in each country's language.
I went to the trouble of registering in 6 different countries; in some countries, Amazon more or less helps sellers submit reports; in others, they offer to partner with local lawyers.
The result is a mess of reports, injunctions, penalties for late filing, etc. coming to you in Polish, German, Spanish, Hungarian. I eventually gave up.
Europe is not actually a "single market". It's a federated bureaucracy entirely indifferent (or hostile) to small businesses.
Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.
It's comforting to believe that large corporations with the greed of the rich and powerful is what makes these inefficiencies but really it's about a million little political negotiations, primarily driven by voters dislike of change.
I don't think any EU One-stop-shop scheme covers "local" goods sales in other EU member states yet, i.e. an EU company has to register in all EU countries they hold stock in.
That is changing with the Single VAT Registration (SVR) legislation, effective in 2028.
> And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part.
I'm not convinced that's an accident. I think politicians in Europe are just better than those in the US at hiding who they really work for.
There are numerous examples of regulations in many European countries that create a glass ceiling for anyone who strives to be more than just middle-middle-class, while creating effective loopholes for the wealthy to continue multiplying their wealth.
For example, the total (State + Federal) top tax rate for someone living in California or New York is not too different (maybe 2-3%) from someone living in France or Sweden. But the difference is that in California the top rate does not kick in until you earn north of $1M per year, while in Sweden or France the middle class is already paying those rates.
Likewise, in the US you cannot (legally) shelter your income by declaring it to be foreign income, as you can in most European countries. That is a tax dodge not applicable to the middle class.
And then we have the present discussion: The compliance costs are of course too high for any small business, so these regulations are just another form of regulatory capture to prevent anyone new from breaking into the upper class, while allowing those already there to have it easy.
EU politicians seemed to be fairly captured by corporations generally. Less so than politicians from the countries themselves. Voting turnout for EU representatives is very low compared with voting for local officials. I think its because people know that who they vote for as their chancellor or prime minister can make a big impact on their lives. They see the EU parliament as this distant thing and don't follow it so much. EU representatives therefore don't have as much accountability and can more easily be swayed by lobbying. How else can you explain the whole chat control thing which everyone hates but still keeps getting pushed through. Like who is voting for this a-holes.
It passed on a technicality of present reps voted against in majority but not enough total votes because the president had triggered a special vote for the last session before recess when less reps are present.
Was even one representative that voted for this from a region where the people that they represent wanted it by even the slimmest of majorities? I don't think so. These votes were in full defiance of their constituents.
The one thing EU politicians hate is disruption. Entrepreneurs are fresh entrants trying to disrupt an existing market. The politicians don't even need to be puppets. The fact that these small startups exist and may even succeed is reason enough.
Its not as bad as in the US I think, but yeah, most of the laws are actually (literally) written by corporations. I wouldn't call them puppets, but EU corps have an outsized influence on the outcome of the process.
I don‘t know about EU laws specifically, but national law in Europe is often written by lobby firms in favor of their corporate sponsors. In Iceland for example the main corporate lobby is called Viðskiptaráð, and they brag about the high percentage of laws they write passing at the parliament (in 2007 it was like 90%). I don‘t think things are much different in the rest of Europe (maybe just less obvious due to size differences).
That might be one reason they refuse to be open about their financial supports in their various organizations yes. it is very well known unfortunately..
The entire purpose of EU is trade (trading nations don't go to war etc), trade is more or less defined by large corporations, it's through that lens every decision is made and measured.
Dunno about that. I live in the US. I can start a small business today and the only thing I'd have to do differently is file an additional form on my taxes next year.
Yes, that's a simplification that doesn't apply to every situation, but it is still completely accurate.
That's pretty much the situation in the UK if you are a sole trader. If you set up a limited liability company, that's a separate entity and has its own tax reporting requirement, but nothing onerous. I am a sole trader, and manage a small company separately from that.
One thing I have heard of in the USA is the need for a "business licence". I'm not sure what that is or whether it applies to all businesses, so I'm not sure what it would correspond to in the UK. Neither of my businesses needed any licences or permissions to start trading.
There's no standard concept of a "business license" in the US either. Generally, the corporate registration / LLC filing is all you need to start doing business as a limited liability company, and you don't need to do anything special as a sole proprietor. Sometimes state and local governments have special requirements for particular types of activity, and require registration to begin operating in a regulated field. City and county governments sometimes have a business tax that you have to pay if you're operating a facility open to the public, and may require the tax receipt to be on display on your premises.
Interstate commerce also seems to be vastly easier inside the US in comparison to the alleged single market of the EU. The most companies seem to deal with is California-specific regulations. Meanwhile, most companies in the EU eventually opt to create a ton of subsidiaries, basically one per state, to handle all the localized duties that the EU requires.
That is the issue across the entire world. Large corporations can easily bear the cost of regulatory laws, environmental requirements, rules, and regulations. They can also go to great lengths to promote an environment that is almost nightmarish for a smaller company or entrepreneur trying to enter the game.
They create barrier after barrier through their lobbying efforts. A good example is having to pay $50,000 for an inspector to come and determine whether your automatic door opens and closes properly, or to verify that your facility does not have a chimney. A friend of mine who owns a business in Niagara Falls, Canada, had to pay around $10,000 for a wind assessment to determine where chimney exhaust would go once released. He didn’t even have a chimney. They ended up having to have another inspection to verify they didn't have a chimney.
Many of these environmental laws are intentionally created and applied to small businesses as well, even when the cost of meeting the requirements is greater than what the business could realistically generate in sales.
The result is that large corporations can absorb these costs, while small businesses and entrepreneurs are often priced out before they even have a chance to compete.
The US is wealthier, has more billionaires and has fewer of these barriers for small entrepreneurs. So no, this is not the monocausal explanation that applies equally everywhere.
(YES, the US has regulatory capture, YES the wealthy attempt to use it, YES we should try to eliminate it here too, but it remains true that it is easier to run a small business in the US, while having more billionaires. There are other explanations to the differential here).
Agreed, europe has a culture of "stability" first. The fear of disruption and chaos is larger after two WW and it outsourced the risks of disruption to the US. Basically, use the us as a test-mouse for new ideas and innovations, then when proven safe introduce them and ride those coat-tails to infinity.
> use the us as a test-mouse for new ideas and innovations, then when proven safe introduce them and ride those coat-tails to infinity
What actually happened, and continues to happen, is that Europe and the EU became entirely dependent on US tech and other foreign industry. It wasn't just a matter of "see what works and then copy it domestically". It oursourced basically everything.
Is fetishizing disruption good for USA? It did helped to create a billionaire oligarch class, but that class is literally intentionally destroying it. I mean, it may end up destroying Europe and the rest of the world too, but the US democracy seem to be their first target.
Even medium-sized corporations are not willing to send products across borders to consumers (say, outside Germany), further destroying the single market.
I think this is a big factor. While I would prefer a more federated US, the US as is is a great market to start in. It's 350M fairly wealthy people under mostly the same tech restrictions. That's a great place to grow.
It's important to remember that even without the fact that big companies basically write the regulations, regulations naturally tend to being effectively regressive wrt company stage/size. Every new one is a hurdle that a bigger company has more resources to overcome.
> It's 350M fairly wealthy people under mostly the same tech restrictions
and, on a case-by-case basis, those people are generally happy to adopt other states' standards in the name of convenience and efficiency (California notwithstanding). Look at E-ZPass/I-Pass as a great example of harmonization across states.
It's funny. Ask any Illinoisan how they feel about adopting Ohio's policies and they'd bristle. But say "hey we're gonna make your highway transponder work in every state east of the Rockies" and they're all for it.
I have to wonder if Europe has the same thing going on.
In the EU you have to distinguish between "Directives" and "Regulations".
A "Regulation" becomes "law" in any member state without modification. No member state has to adopt anything. Examples are the GDPR and the new Machine Regulation.
A "Directive" does not become "law" in any member state. A member state has to enact their own national laws to implement the directive until a given date. It does not have to be single law. It could spread many laws. An example is the Machine Directive before it was re-released as Machine Regulation.
Can you elaborate more? When you say "checks and balances" do you mean explicit legal mechanisms or implicit mechanisms like Tiebout-style foot voting? For the latter areas with "almost zero oversight" seem advantages. Also, can you give an example of these low-oversight places and how it manifests? I'm thankful even for some pointers in what to search for.
One example is the effective prohibition on spraying pesticides by air, including drone. Drones allow lower pesticide use than current, legal practices
Living in Europe, I find that with LLMs, it is possible to navigate the federal & law jungle. However, LLMs don't protect you from institutional envy or the resistance of people trying to block progress simply because it is perceived as 'too modern' or disruptive. I find this the hardest challenge. And I have the feeling during times of general decline, like these, it gets worse.
Right, it's a zero-sum mentality versus a growth mentality. When people don't believe that growth is possible then they focus on guarding what they have.
I personally hate the "reenact" the old- good times to recreate the prosperity cargo cults. What created those prosperous times, where "characters" that would just do things, and ask for forgiveness by the law later. And that was actually priced into the justice system, by giving the judges a range to verdict from. In a way, the rule of law was much less strict in the 50s and 60s and way more informal.
Ah yes, let’s give the EU and its undemocratic system in which policy formation is heavily filtered through a relatively narrow professional political class, ordinary voters have weak or almost no direct control over major policy choices, dissent encounters administrative/economic punishment, and central institutions possess and use powerful financial means to discipline peripheral governments should have even more centralised power?
And no, just because voting for MEPs is bolted on there as a pressure valve doesn’t suddenly make it all okay when most of the real decisions happen behind closed doors and adherence to the passed laws, no matter how damaging is ensured through financial coercion.
Not a single person voted or agreed to this law, and yet here we are.
Yeah, that's always been my concern with the EU (I'm American, for context): the long worrying practice where the legal concept of the EU is assembled by a small group who very much want EU citizens to go back to sleep and only wake up once all the laws and regulation has been created.
A federation makes sense to me: I live in one. But how the EU has assembled itself in a way that seems to unrepresentative has been worrying to watch over the last couple decades.
The bigger issue in OP's case is they are dependent on de minimis.
The de minimis crackdown [0] and EPR [1] are both being rolled out because Chinese conglomerates like Pinduoduo (Temu) and SHEIN took undue advantage of that while ignoring European regulators on issues such as environmental regulations on packaging [2], dark patterns [2], breaching the Digital Services Act [3], and gacha/addictive engagement mechanisms [4].
All of OP's proposals directly conflict with the goal of de minimis taxation and the EPR.
Seems European HNers are fine with European regulations until it hurts their niche interests or pocketbook.
The issue is that those marketplaces got too mainstream, and the average consumer is too stupid.
10-15 years ago if you were importing stuff from China you'd know that the trade off for cheaper prices is that you'd lose your consumer laws protection and you'd be on your own. If you wanted those, then you'd go to your local retailer and pay extra.
And then everyone started doing it, which meant that your local retailer isn't in business anymore (see local high streets in many countries). The choice you had 10-15 years ago doesn't exist anymore because everyone went for the cheaper price, and now the question is where the extra goes that we used to pay to the local retailer.
Means nothing though because no European country can produce the goods an impoverished European can afford to pay for the goods so the local store is just the same Chinese goods shipped to that address other than your home address.
Please elaborate on less strict rules for Gdpr? There is Record of Processing Activities exemption for <250, but if you have to comply with Gdpr (and you do), you need essentially same info as Ropa and of course it has to be up to date. How else can you ensure you are in compliance?
Because if the EU tried to force countries into single compliance, there would no end of "EU is trampling national interests" and similar screaming.
It's an unwinnable situation. Again, EU-level politics keep assuming everyone (corporations and states) are adults. Unfortunately, everyone are just a bunch of screaming, scheming petulant children.
>Again, EU-level politics keep assuming everyone (corporations and states) are adults. Unfortunately, everyone are just a bunch of screaming, scheming petulant children.
One in four MEPs are involved in scandals [0] ranging from harassment to organized crime and corruption. The European Parliament also remains a free out-of-jail card through abuse of parliamentary immunity, and they do abuse it [1]. EU politics is a circus.
One of the best example is Ursula Von der Leyen. She was sent from Berlin to EU by Angela Merkle because when she was the defence minister of Germany under Merkle’s government there was a huge scandal of offering contracts (https://www.euractiv.com/news/von-der-leyen-admits-mistakes-...)
She was sent to EU so she can do less harm in the future, but the irony is that she became the head of EU.
> there would no end of "EU is trampling national interests" and similar screaming
To just call this "screaming" is to completely dismiss a real and huge problem. The EU is the idea that countries should fuse into economic areas, but the countries are also individual still. Of course there's a lot of friction.
For example, because Greece was in the Euro, they couldn't inflate their currency to compensate for the fact that they gradually outsourced more and more work to Germany, until they had nothing left and hit a financial crisis because their government couldn't borrow more money. That's not mindless screaming.
Do you realize that your example actually counters your point? The Greece's example illustrates that a misbehaving minority shouldn't have an outsized influence on the majority, which is a correct thing to aim for, I completely agree with you on that. But the current EU arrangement actually allows minority entities to veto majority's initiatives and improvements, exactly because EU is not fully federated. 1 member country can screech and blackmail 26 other members for any arbitrary reason, and they all must comply with this minority's ultimatum. If EU was a federation, majority would simply outvote any obstructionists.
They could neither fix the problem with the policy tools a country with its own currency would have, nor did they have the automatic support from a central budget a region or state of a country would have.
Greece could have fixed their problems by cutting spending and collecting more taxes (not necessarily higher taxes, but actually collecting the taxes that were owed). Currency inflation was never necessary.
No, the Greeks were cool and calculating, turning an inflating fake fiat currency into hard assets like real estate, while not working or producing anything.
The introduction of the Euro was the start signal for each country to try to inflate as much as they can for their own benefit - since the first inflator gets the best value out of the currency. Idiots are left holding paper currency worth less and less each day. Having to work harder and harder in a never ending spiral.
It's all about PR. If EU formulates the new law like they are fighting against pollution and plastic garbage, it sounds nice enough to the electorate who are content with greenwashing and won't investigate much. And 99% of population won't ever a hear a word about real issues by the sellers, to them sellers would quietly and imperceptibly start disappearing. But a direct fee sounds more like a tax hike and the same electorate ordering packages from foreign shops would definitely remember that.
It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
It shows up in the stats, citizens almost always trust EU more than their governments and want EU to have more power but all this means those local governments becoming less important and therefore no one is really pushing for it.
Fingers crossed Trump invades Greenland so things can start moving.
> It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
The lesson is the opposite: The EU needs LESS power, not more. If the member states didn't have a cartel to tyrannize their collective population, this regulation could never have happened. Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
If I were a small seller I would just ignore this, like many sellers on Temu do.
Before you get into trouble, someone must take notice that you did not register for the recipient fiefdom's protectionism racket. And if that happens, it is not sure that you really are in trouble. As with the GDPR, this kind of regulation is almost unenforcable in practice.
This echos the FCC rules in the US, which I believe are gotten around by not complying.
Even if you are not making an intentional radiator, and/or are using datasheet-specified layouts or modules, you still must comply, which makes these businesses non-viable if complying.
I believe Adafruit gets around certifying every device by declaring themselves a cellphone company and being on good terms with regulators. This isn't viable for the sort of businesses and people described by this article.
I'm not sure about the Ali/Amazon products. I'm assuming they just are not complying.
FCC allows suppliers to self-declare conformance with EMI/EMC rules. You’re obviously taking a risk selling stuff if you haven’t had it properly tested so don’t really know if it passes but it’s unlikely to really be an issue for a small maker selling low quantities, especially if any intentional radiators (Bluetooth, WiFi etc.) are already-certified modules.
Your device tends to need to be causing problems, that the FCC then go and track down, and then come back to you. That is (hopefully, depending on the kind of device) extremely unlikely.
As for Ali stuff, probably lots of it is not tested but still comes with a FCC label - but if it is shipped from overseas, who is going to take responsibility for it? Nobody… So there is nothing they can do except fine the person who bought it if it’s really causing problems (and usually I doubt they’d even do that if the user wasn’t intentionally doing something they shouldn’t have been, they are just told to stop and maybe the device would be seized/ destroyed)
> FCC allows suppliers to self-declare conformance with EMI/EMC rules
Yes, though they can also ask for your lab results or to inspect your testing facility and hit you with massive fines if it turns out you falsified your compliance documents. As you mentioned this is very rare though - even enforcement actions against non-certified intentional radiators are uncommon.
Huh. I thought that is actually the EU that allows self declared conformance, rather than the FCC. But looking into this it seems both do?
I recall trying to build some hardware in 2020 and getting discouraged because of the CE/FCC silliness. Even though I could self declare for the EU it seemed like a big risk to do so.
As a hardware guy it totally kills me, to get a fun or needed small time product off the ground and legally onto the market can require ~$250k of lab certifications.
Imagine making a mod for a video game, and to legally cover your ass, go through months of testing that cost $250,000.
Talk about killing a project in the cradle.
On the flip side, there are engineers who absolutely do not give a fuck, and will design their product with zero regard for emissions. To them the world is "If it's not illegal, then I cannot comprehend why I cannot take it to the extreme".
Firstly for the reasons outlined in the article: it essentially makes being a micro/small business in the EU impossible, if your market is other EU countries.
Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.
The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they just implemented. I can assure you it is difficult to ignore a law that comes with a €200000 fine for non-compliance.
Gosh I hate it when politicians are useless and incompetent, since it just validates the false populist propaganda that politicians can be useless and incompetent, which is clearly not true (even in cases when politicians actually are useless and incompetent, which they of course cannot be, since that is evil propaganda).
Politicians can be quite evil, but in a functioning democracy they need to be at least competent at gathering support and navigating the occasional backstabbing plots to make it to the highest ranks of government. So I'm hesitant to call them totally incompetent.
I agree. I say this as a eurosceptic myself. HN and Twitter make it seem like the EU is borderline third world that is moments away from collapse.
Germany is the third largest economy in the world. The EU as a bloc is the second largest economy in the world.
While lagging considerably behind the US and China in services, it still is among the leaders in energy and manufacturing.
It’s in decline, but it’s really not anything that can’t be fixed.
Certainly not anywhere HN/Twitter like to make it out to be.
The EU is facing a two-front information war. A strong EU doesn’t benefit the US, Russia or China. Having said that, a lot of US criticisms that are propagandised against the EU are mostly fair criticisms, the EU makes it easy for its adversaries to propagandise low hanging fruit (such as the bureaucracy on display here)
Stability - on the defense, is like goal-keeping in soccer. You can protect the goal 99.99% and still loose. And therein lies the crux! The EU does not attack, it seems to think that waiting for the old world to return is enough - basically a extended hibernation to another episode of good times.
But maybe this is it. Maybe good times, made via surplus bribery by innovation and innovators will not come around for a while. So what do you call a strategy that relies on something hopefully to come, that you are unable to produce or even articulate you need.
> feels mostly like astro-turfing attempts at destabilisation
Well it is certainly the perfect conditions for it, the EU is surrounded by friends and enemies alike who openly seek to break it up and the biggest companies in the world are doing everything they can to defy and undermine regulation efforts.
There's no "catastrophising" here. This is simply an article that rationally explains why the latest EU regulation is well meaning but poorly implemented.
It just so happens that the same is true for a lot of EU technical regulation.
At what point are we allowed to say "the EU is failing to regulate its members effectively"?
Or are we not allowed to say that because it would create some kind of catastrophe where the EU Commission loses its power over the EU27 and Russia invades (or somesuch catastrophising...?)
This is actively preventing me from sending packages to other countries as a maker. No matter how small the risk is, I don't want to risk a 5000 euro fine for sending a small amount of packages to other EU countries.
Really sorry you’re experiencing this, that whole regulation rollout is a complete mess. The leadership should be sacked for such an incompetent regulation, it’s insane how much troubles they are creating for small businesses.
Do you send them as your business or as yourself? If it's the latter, then I would consider forming a business to take on the risk. That's not free either, but think of it as insurance.
... but you can still fail to notice one, and you can gauge and to some degree control your risk of being fined.
In fact, if you sell 10 hobby prototype boards to other hobbyists, you probably have a higher risk of getting hit by a bus on the way to the post office than you do of being fined.
This is a great read and I can extend this argument really to any small business. Tax filing, VAT, bookkeeping, privacy, consumer, workplace and sectoral requirements frequently impose a disproportionately large cost on microbusinesses. EU is more and more split along the enterprise and VC backed line, and everyone in between has disproportionate costs. My barber in Stockholm often complains about this - the amount of money they would need to earn to overcome all these costs is staggering. So they often do lots of gigs on the side.
General view of EU politicians is that working class should be working for big corporations. Running own business is a sin.
The big corporations also don't want people to run small business, because they remove themselves from the job market and cannot be hired / exploited. So they lobby EU FOR regulations that ensure people cannot run business.
I initially learned about this from a luthier and plectrum designer, Hufschmidt Guitars, a one man shop in Switzerland. Some quotes from the update he sent to his customers:
"""
For a one-person workshop, the result has been pretty brutal.
[...]
The numbers simply do not work for a micro-business like mine. Even in France and Germany, I send only around 1 to 2 kg of cardboard per year. In some other EU countries, I may send less than 100 g in an entire year. Paying annual compliance costs for one or two parcels makes no economic sense.
[...]
I have therefore decided to maintain EU shipping only to: FRANCE GERMANY
"""
UK has similar rules but, as with pretty much all other similar regulations, there are de minimis carve-outs:
≤ £1m turnover: no packaging EPR obligation, regardless of packaging volume.
£1m turnover + >25 tonnes of packaging: small producer obligations.
£2m turnover + >50 tonnes: large producer obligations.
The EU has been removing de minimis thresholds because 'China' can easily 'exploit' them. They're kind of right, but it's obviously an insanely stupid situation when someone selling something as a hobby, or just starting up on their own gets dragged into this.
I don't know but I highly suspect this law will mainly effect people drop shipping from China and will benefit companies like us who for moral reasons work to re-shore production.
When I get packages from Europe it's always is recyclable cardboard while from China it's always wrapped in plastic.
When I get packages from Europe or the USA it's always branded so the company responsible is always clearly shown, while from China it's usually brandless.
It appears there is space for "packaging and distribution in EU as a service" business model.
Creators, producers and manufacturers in many fields do not distribute or sell directly to consumers (musicians can't directly upload to Spotify and Apple Music; film producers don't upload to Netflix, writers don't print their books).
A small-time maker may pay a fee to the established distributor of the physical products, who takes care of compliance, and uses their packaging and distribution channels.
Good idea, except that the regulation (as I understand it) prevents this. The company sending out the packaging to the customer is the one who has to register. It's possible to hire consulting to set this up, but the fees don't go a way or get distributed over a broader set of shoulders.
As someone living in the tiny country of Estonia with just about 1.2 million residents, this worries me. No one but the biggest online shops in the EU will bother with the paperwork for such a small market. I'm expecting my import options to drop sharply in the coming years because of this.
The complaint is totally understandable, BUT the examples do not make sense.
Arduino did not start as some dude selling less than 10 boards a year, but as an educational tool, which THEN ramped up to 100s of boards produced every day.
If your perspective is "I may sell 10 boards this year, maybe", your target is some local/national maker-faire, not a EU marketplace.
I think makers with such limited productions will just fly under the radar (if you sell so little, it's likely you probably won't need to incorporate or declare taxes in a lot of EU countries).
If they sell 100s of products across EU, they probably have at least one over-worked accountant taking care of existing compliance stuff.
It sounds like a pain for any small company, not just individual makers. There are many small manufacturers of boutique equipment that could be sold at dozens units per year, and this would add massive bureaucratic overhead.
"... there are separate registration and recycling schemes for each of the 28+ EU member jurisdictions (and even a few of their provinces). What part of COMMON MARKET was so hard to understand for EU lawmakers ?
Since there is no single registration available, and separate registration would involve mindboggling complexity, bureaucracy and costs, we do not sell to EU end users until the EU gets their act together. Please order from EU based distributors, or as a business customer.
Business customers are expected to meet their obligations by registering in the EU countries they sell in. "
That was already ages ago when I did some sofware for them. 2007 ish if I'm to trust my Linkedin.
They make those directives that each member state has to implement and then maybe at some point they'll unify it at some point. This is how it was with VAT. It took them so long to come up with VAT OSS scheme, it's ridiculous.
Of course you had to register to VAT in each member state separately, but at least there were minimal limits in that case.
With EPR and WEEE you are liable from first item sold and now marketplaces are supposed to verify your registration.
The problem with EPR in particular is there’s so much lobbying and money in the recycling cartel now that there’s practically zero chance they will unify it at any point soon.
EU also recently introduced a 3 euro fee on all packages from China. Maybe well intentioned but it puts a huge markup, when a thinker wants to buy a very specific 0.05 euro spring from AliExpress or something along those lines.
You really have to wonder what Xi Jinpeng thinks of all this.
The extent to which China can appear to do nothing while the west kills itself is just unbelievable. How could you possibly respect people that can't get out of their own way so repeatedly?
These sorts of regulations are killing not just companies in Europe but across most of the world.
Unless you are a medium to large-sized company, it is very difficult to remain fully compliant with the regulations in most nations now - across fields, from packaging, to agriculture, to food, aviation..
I understand the package complains, and I understand how it undermines the maker scenario.
I think smartly using the scale of things might be helpful, but they are targeting Qualcomm and not Arduino users.
Unfortunately, because all of us have postponed thinking about solving the problem, now we have a problem and braking is safer than not breaking at all.
In my country we do have advanced collecting systems but it all falls apart when different materials can be prioritised. There were an interesting proposal of having the companies to buy back the recyclable rubbish but that was scraped.
I was up to this. Because they would need to emit in the docs the amount of money the package cost and how much they would pay back, it was possible to track the sources from a fiscal eyes.
I think it was scraped because people already thought on ways of breaking it, instead of giving better alternatives.
I've seen some conflicting claims on this law and to me it sounded like it affects mostly producers of packaging, but everyone else seems to be complaining about it too. Did everyone actually read the law or is this a game of telephone?
The terminology is confusing. Under the PPWR, a “producer” is not necessarily someone who manufactures packaging. The regulation also covers businesses selling packaging or packaged products directly to end users in another Member State. So a maker shipping a board in an envelope can indeed be the packaging producer for EPR purposes.
I can attest to this. People say the Netherlands is among the best countries to be an entrepreneur. The visa policies for starting a business are good. But man, the whole tax system, shares, and holding management—belasting breathing up your neck—is horrible when I am trying to do firefighting. You never know when you might get hit by a tax bill. The tax system is built towards benefitting large organizations, and they can afford expensive tax consultants who can help them dodge it. The VC ecosystem is limited and not risk averse.
Having operated in multiple geographies, US is really business friendly.
It is possible to ignore laws if it's too much bother to comply with them... it's hard to imagine the authorities will come after someone for mailing out 10 anti-static bags.
The problem is that even this has a chilling effect on innovation:
1.It will dissuade some people from starting in the first place because it's one more hurdle. Even if in practice people don't comply, the existence of that complexity will dissuade some people.
2.Even if nobody is being prosecuted for mailing 10 anti-static bags, what is the number at which you do comply? And once you do, will you be held accountable for everything that came before?
That's a very American mindset. I've worked across both the US and EU at a variety of companies with customers, partners, etc and it's a clear pattern:
- Americans are usually willing to skirt the rules and figure it out later. This comes with risk but is ideal when you're early stage, low stakes, and you couldn't follow the rules anyway.
- Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book and will be shocked if you suggest otherwise. Being process oriented is great for high stakes industries where lives and safety are on the line but destroys startups, likely slowing or even killing innovation.
There is no floor to the level of "petty" that can happen here: the UK - granted, not the EU - goes after individuals who don't pay their TV license and determine the who by triangulating unlicensed TVs via radio trucks and inspectors looking in your windows.
The TV license is silly but the detector van situation is bogus, at least in the present day; really they just blanket mail demand letters to every address in the database on the assumption that everyone watches TV.
> Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book
Again on HN, I don't think conflating Europe and all Europeans into a uniform culture works. This might be true of Germany but as you get further from Berlin it is .. less so.
(Famous story from the Greek debt crisis of using satellite photos to find swimming pools and therefore people who were probably underpaying income tax, which was at such poor compliance levels the state was struggling)
Yes, it appears the "detector vans" are an urban legend/propoganda.
Even more fun, in the lead up to Greece joining the EU, they had to get their government pay under control so they were given monthly caps on what they could pay people. No problem, they created a 13th month.
* As detailed in Michael Lewis' Boomerang: https://amzn.to/4cXJnjE - He's the same guy who wrote The Big Short and Moneyball
Perhaps one explanation is personal bankruptcy? At least in Scandinavia/Finland this is an unknown concept. You mess up your business (Ireland has EPR fines upto 500ke) and end up paying company loans for the rest of your life.
I don't think any bank will give you such a huge personal loan that you could end up in debt for your whole life, since they typically want the loan repaid. The only way I can imagine that happening is if you're a sole proprietor and you get sued or fined. I can't think of another way to get exposed to that much liability.
Most people are under the impression that those triangulating trucks can't detect anything and they're just an obvious looking enforcement truck used as a scare tactic, is that not the case?
I don't really have this experience. A lot of business I have worked with followed the "let's just do it and figure out the risk later" approach. In highly regulated environment it was different, but then looking for ways to squirt around the rules was the game. See for example the CumCum (don't blame me, it was called like that) tax-evasion scheme put in place by french banks.
Depends on what Europe you mean. Europe can be quite different depending on where you are. I wouldn't say northern Europe wants to do it by the book all the time like the Germans.
Quite common to view Europe as all the same, but Europe varies much more than what US does.
I find this hard to discuss among others as it often results in heated discussions, but in my experience, Europeans have a completely different understanding of what is considered "rude" so much that I struggle to work with a vast majority of them.
That's not to say that there aren't extremely nice people all other Europe... there are. But I'm still caught off guard when hearing them say some things nonchalantly that would get them fired in the US.
Not sure if it's a pattern but when I interviewed with an EU company recently, they explicitly asked if I was married and if I had kids. They explained it as they had a "European mindset towards weekends and holidays" and they expected me to NOT be online.
I was fine with the mindset but never expected to get those questions in an interview, as it'd be illegal in the States.
Yeah, I always ignore them, first in my own country (NL) and after that in EU. Even if they fine (which they don't for small companies/persons), they will not spend money/efforts to cash the fine anyway, especially across borders. I had a few useless fines in the 35 years of my company, never will pay them.
Maybe it's super convenient for you in the moment, but the aggregate effect is pretty bad. If everyone just ignores laws because they're too much hassle and they don't expect to get caught, enforcement becomes incredibly difficult. You end up with loads of laws that technically exist but are only selectively enforced, which is a pretty serious problem.
Courts, lobbying (writing to your MP), campaigning, demonstrations, elections ideally. I know that non-compliance is the path of least resistance, it's just got really bad consequences.
Sounds like a great opportunity for folks to sue you for exactly that. Same with the imprint requirement in Germany. There are people out there looking for small businesses without an imprint to extract some money from them.
As they should. As a customer, I want to be able to hold a business accountable, and the minimum requirement for that is being able to identify the legal person responsible for that business.
Yes, I too want the smallest Twitch streamer to have to put their exact home address publicly on the internet so they have no protection from weirdos and stalkers. If a post box would suffice, sure, I'd be down. But that's explicitly not allowed.
But regardless, kinda OT. I was just trying to make a point that ignoring a law isn't without consequences.
And then there is Temu (as a platform). They've done all the necessary EPR/PPWR agreements with various European countries/vendors. It handles all the fees and reporting for Chinese sellers.
Yup, soon they will offer to handle the compliance for EU sellers for no risk and low and behold the idiots have given away a tax on selling in the single market to another country before they know it.
full disclosure: I'm a micro-entrepreneur and I suspended all orders to other EU countries.
The PPWR is causing a lot of buzz, but they are missing the main point for a market place such as lectronz. PPWR is only for packaging and shipping material.
There's something similar called WEEE* for electronics. It's when you need to pay a fee at the end of the product life cycle. This is very similar to PPWR, you need to register in each member state to be able to sell electronics. The solution is also a one stop shop. But Lectronz fail to also mention this. I would argue that this is an even bigger issue than PPWR since it's already in place. Even if the PPWR is solved it's still nearly impossible to sell electronics to other EU member states.
Someone has been sleeping when these regulations were being discussed...
The new EU regulation on Digital Product Passports may have similar effects on small businesses.
I was expecting that they would build the "passport" on top of existing design standards but that doesn't seem to be the case, the recent webinar on it doesn't go into much detail though.
The reason for this mess is because individual countries want to retain some kind of control over the whole thing such as VAT/tax investigations and implementation of the laws. In a way it’s the “worst” of both worlds federated and individual countries but somehow still better than the latter.
Doesn't this new law overlap with the existing system? A manufacturer within the EU is already paying taxes, which in part should be used for managing waste. If they buy the packaging materials from another EU company, well that company is also paying taxes already. If they are importing from outside the EU, the packaging material pays taxes.
These blog posts often allude that the EU regulatory bodies are just slightly incompetent or short-sighted and these fragmented national models happen by accident. But unfortunately that's not the case: The EU pretends to be a single-market and almost mantra-like the EU officials keep repeating it. But the fact of the matter is that there is neither a single market nor is the European public ready for one. If there was a true single market (like the US has one) - then this would very quickly lead to massive changes in the labour market. Imagine all the Romanian construction companies suddenly building office buildings in Madrid. Or countless Polish architects suddenly undercutting the much more expensive architects in Milano. Whether they know it or not, Europeans would like to have all the benefits of a single market (mostly more competitive pricing) without any of the downsides (massive labour shifts) - but that option doesn't exist. So what they do is harmonize regulation for a few big corporations, while all the smaller companies (and their employees) still get to keep their national moats.
In most EU countries law, this one is also considered as "solid business", regardless if you are incorporated or not:
If you are running on a level with focus one some revenue, if you are doing it somehow regularly and if you have at least some infrastructure to look like you are a corporate (billing system, customer care or similar), then you may fall under corp rules, even if you are not acting as an entity.
Is this not a business idea? Like register for packaging waste schemes in every country and sell it to small companies for some profit? Or doesn't it work this way?
These approaches will waste billions upon billions of Euros for no good reason. Having different VAT rates per-country already leads to overcomplication in so many places.
In the EU some companies simply cannot grow because of laws like that. They might want to grow, but can't because of laws that says if your company has more than X employees you suddenly have to deal with a bunch of extra bureaucracy and reporting requirements. These companies purposely stay small, and basically has stopped hiring, even if they could use more manpower.
This has its own issues. Big bad actors can now split their activities between more smaller companies to avoid some regulation. I've seen it happening.
That would just add tons of extra paperwork and a much larger administrative system to vet all the sizes of companies. IRL they will probably not even be enforcing this widely (like GDPR) but the costs will still be imposed on any business wanting to sell in Europe.
Selective enforcement is just tyranny, but what I think they were getting at is a minimum size enshrined in law. I don't think it's a great idea, really highlights how arbitrary this all is and presents a risk of advantaging the worst actors more than real makers, but it's a valid way forward.
Laws like this are a good idea but its too burdensome for small companies so it cripples innovations and small businesses. Only applying it to larger companies let's it apply to only the companies who have the largest impact and also can afford compliance, while not stifling small businesses. Not perfect but I think it's a decent tradeoff.
Anthropic is famous for routinely and openly calling for more regulation of themselves. They claim safety motives and their opponents claim that they're trying to pull up the ladder behind them. Opinion: They're both right.
as the whole world crushes small entities one has to wonder whether the EU would be the saviour or not. Apparently not. With its rules, they merely help crush small business as per usual.
I heard in the 50s an american could just startup a business installing septic tanks. But now the same person would need a myriad of regulations to be met, heavy equipment use mandated, all of which raise overhead to a level where its impossible to get off the ground.
I always felt the EU were the "good guys", IE not allowing corps to steam roll everyone, what with their rules fining poor behvaiour such as privacy violations, chargers being non standard etc.
However the same problem exists in weird ways you wouldnt even imagine.
For example if someone walks into a small "mom and pops" coffee shop and accuse the owner of "ejecting them due to harrasment reasons", that results in a court case, which can bankrupt the whole margin thin enterprise.
You might say, wait how on earth would a random troublemaker get funding to take a cafe to court, and for what benefit? For one its easier for a settlement to be reached regardless of fault that benefits the claimant than a long court process.
Now how could claimants have the resources? Unbelievably it turns out there are free national non profit corporations that will take any claim for free to court for situation mentioned above.
So what happens in the end? The small coffee shops cant survive but the larger corps who can afford the random payouts are fine, the competition seems to go away on its own and the claimants are happy with what amounts to random payouts for little work.
Please look it up it, and correct me if im wrong, I only know this from some little research into the forays of why small coffee shops find it hard to survive in western landscapes and risks, as I wanted to open my own coffee shop!
In summary, as always the road to ruin is paved with good intentions. So the EU trying to help a little guy in a specific context, ends up creating a situation that makes all small coffee shops non profitable.
> I heard in the 50s an american could just startup a business installing septic tanks. But now the same person would need a myriad of regulations to be met, heavy equipment use mandated, all of which raise overhead to a level where its impossible to get off the ground.
You can still do such businesses, but the red tape and other requirements are enourmous: health department and construction applications, soil tests, inspections, manufacturing requirements, and so on. The additional costs and delays are passed on to customers.
It's not just septic tanks, it's all areas of construction and one of the reasons why in many states (like New York and California) it's impossible to make low-cost housing anymore, or (like in Florida) new regulations governing old construction are leading to sky-high reserve requirements and condo fees.
There's also the phenomenon of people just ignoring the laws or bypassing them. For your septic tank example, in Alabama out in the countryside people with low cost prefab houses ("double wides") don't want to pay $10,000 to dig a trench for a septic tank, so they just run sewer hoses deep into the woods or ditches. https://www.epa.gov/septic/surface-discharge-raw-wastewater-...
You’re the one making the claim, so please provide sources for your fantastical scenario. By your logic there should be no small coffee shops across the EU, yet this is verifiably and patently untrue.
You should do your own research and I don’t want to take up space on HN but I’m happy to take a look can you name what exactly you found hard to believe? It’s been known for decades small business can’t survive legal landscape as easily as large corps.
If you are confused by the statement there are no small coffee shops - are you living in Europe? From first hand experience coffee shops survive less than a couple years on any high street , yet there is a Starbucks on every street corner and it’s a well known fact small coffee shops operate on almost non existent margins.
Sure, but you should also understand that “look it up” is the escape words of every inane claim. “The Earth is flat, look it up”; “Reptilians are controlling the world, do your own research”; “Bill Gates is injecting you with mind-control chips, google it”.
You can “do your own research” and “confirm” anything. Which is why the person making the original claim should provide sources, so we can all discuss the same thing and not talk past each other. If your sources are flawed, it’s much easier to reach that conclusion if we’re all looking at the same thing.
> I don’t want to take up space on HN
Don’t worry, a few characters won’t make a difference.
> I’m happy to take a look
Thank you.
> can you name what exactly you found hard to believe?
Certainly. It’s paragraphs 5–8 in your original post. The claim that there are random troublemakers regularly employing free national non-profit corporations in the EU to extort and bankrupt local coffee shops by lying about having been ejected for racial reasons.
Is there room for a company in the EU to spend some time doing the research as to what packaging is able to be used across all the different countries, then selling affordable packaging that meets those standards across the board? And also publish resources for how to effectively package stuff? A genuine question, I’m not from Europe. It just seems like something that would benefit everyone and help make this less of an issue. Or maybe this is the responsibility of the postal systems themselves? If you’re gonna mandate a certain way of doing things, at least give people the tools to do it the way you want them to.
Yes there are some middlemen , but that really shouldn’t be necessary. That becomes just a sort of racket business. The main problem isn’t what packages should be, it’s that businesses must get a license in every single EU member they want to send a package to. That’s just insane, and there is no unified portal. Some countries don’t even yet have a portal.
They'll get adequate feedback in the next elections If this doesn't get stopped, otherwise every business and their peers will likely vote for EU critic parties which means far left or far right.
Sounds a bit like registering and reported to each country's VAT system, which almost no online creators do (even ones making hundreds of thousands of online subsription revenue)
Is this killing the makers or the marketplace? Can the micro-entrepreneurs still list/sell via larger marketplaces? I can see how this is killing the micro-marketplace though.
I believe the view layed out in the article is wrong. The German Wikipedia has an article about the PPWR. One Paragraph is saying: "The distributor must verify that the manufacturer and, where applicable, the importer have fulfilled their requirements, that all necessary markings are affixed to the packaging, and that the manufacturer is registered in the producer register pursuant to Article 44." That does not sound like you are responsible for registering yourself but you need to purchase your packaging from registered vendors and you need to verify that. Sound reasonable to me.
Unfortunately, for direct cross-border sales, the regulation explicitly makes the seller the "producer" in the customer’s Member State, and requires registration there. Buying an envelope from a registered Greek supplier does not register the seller in Germany or France.
OK you are right, i looked at a different regulation. But, i still do not understand why i cannot buy pregistered packaging for the whole EU? Or why i cannot register in one country for all Cross Border sales. I mean there are minimum standards imposed by the EU and the packages need to have a mark. So why is it like that? Even more 1 years after the draghi report....
I'm sorry I don't buy this. A "micro-entrepreneur" should be trusted to design a product complying with the regulations of 27 member states but cannot be bothered by the packaging requirements?
My guess is that most of the products on this website simply do not comply with the norms and regulations they ought to, thus why care if they don't comply to waste management either.
You don't generally have to pay a bureaucracy tax to each of the member states to do business there. At some point we might as well just bring back tariffs and do away with the overhead of the EU
It's typical eco-suicide: give eurocrats more power and fake work to do, pretend most recycling regulations aren't scams, and practically destroy trade between countries in the union because you need one representative in every single country you want to sell anything in. As if adding a 5 (soon to become 7€) fee (plus tax) for every line of item (not package) outside the union wasn't enough. It is also quite obvious both must've been heavily lobbied by major retail groups through EuroCommerce.
Feedback for this utterly deranged regulation can be seen below, over 5k entries by many businesses in EU:
Is it actually a bad thing? From Asia I definitely see so much shady business practices from small businesses. Customer protection is non-existent. Keeping small businesses in drive prices down, but also drive wages down. I don’t think this is a compromise that many people would be happy with.
Small businesses result in innovation. There is little innovation from big business whose entire mission becomes profit maximization once sufficiently large enough. The little guys are that ones that come with new ideas and move fast to grow it. This is the entire story of startups in the US, silicon valley and more.
Big business also drives down wages way more than small businesses. When you are one of the few major employers in an industry, there is zero need to pay more while sucking in profit. Sure, maybe you could get an union involved but you are still subservient to the same employer who no longer has to respond to any labor market pressure other than quelling the union once in awhile.
I am from Europe and I think this complaint is misplaced. Europe is currently speeding towards neo-liberalism at lightspeed and shows no sign of slowing down. The beneficiaries are primarily the CEOs and big corporations. The workers are certainly not the ones benefiting from the status quo, especially if you look at the stripping down of consumer protection which is starting to look like completely absent in the continent. And on top of everything you have mass austerity, stripping away any social safety net.
However I do not see favoring smaller entrepreneurs over the status quo as something which will improve matters at all. It feels saying our problem is that we have the wrong capitalists. We just need to swap out our old capitalists, get new ones in, and hand them the exploited wealth, and then everything will be good.
What Europe needs is a focus on workers. Enough with capitalism already.
Businesses need workers a lot more then workers need businesses. And Europes whole deal is to shift this power imbalance in favor of the the businesses. This has to stop.
One additional problem is that this reduces options as a consumer in smaller EU countries. Smaller ships no longer are willing to take on the risk and bureaucracy of selling to smaller markets, meaning only a few, large players remain. Like Amazon, Temu, Aliexpress, or larger local companies.
FTR. The whole PPWR process started back in 2015, there was a public consultation period in 2020-21, the new rules were entered into force in February 2025 and now the general application happened. So there was plenty of time to prepare, as far as I can see. People that run a business in the EU and now claim to be surprised, they, well, surprise me.
You must be a fellow German. No where else in the world does the objection that bad legislation has been discussed (very negatively I might add, look up the results from consultation period you quoted) for 10 years have any merit on discussion whether that legislation fulfills its purpose.
So what if businesses "had time to prepare"? Its not the governments / especially the EUs job to waste the time of small businesses.
MISTER PROSSER: But Mister Dent the plans have been available in the planning office for the last nine months!
ARTHUR DENT: Yes! I went round to find them yesterday afternoon. You’d hadn’t
exactly gone out of your way to pull much attention to them have you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.
MISTER PROSSER: The plans were on display.
ARTHUR DENT: Ah! And how many members of the public are in the habit of casually dropping around the local planning office of an evening?
MISTER PROSSER: Er – ah!
ARTHUR DENT: It’s not exactly a noted social venue is it? And even if you had popped in on the off chance that some raving bureaucrat wanted to knock your house down, the plans weren’t immediately obvious to the eye were they?
MISTER PROSSER: That depends where you were looking.
ARTHUR DENT: I eventually had to go down to the cellar!
MISTER PROSSER: That’s the display department.
ARTHUR DENT: With a torch!
MISTER PROSSER: The lights, had… probably gone.
ARTHUR DENT: So had the stairs!
MISTER PROSSER: Well you found the notice didn’t you?
ARTHUR DENT: Yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.
It also surprises and bewilders me that businesses (usually tech or tech adjacent) apparently expect and have for some time expected the ability to do business internationally completely without friction. Which is less something I think is a good or bad idea, and far more just simply an unrealistic one. If you want to sell in a given set of countries, I would think it a given that you would have to deal with the regulations and business laws in each of those given countries. The fact that you want to sell hacker/DIY products to people in less developed markets is admirable, certainly, but it doesn't change that. It's an unsolved problem precisely because it's kind of a pain in the ass to do compliance work across a large number of them. It's why large companies have entire departments devoted to regulatory compliance.
As far as I'm concerned the only way you could say this is "killing" any business is if the business in question has, as you said, spent the last decade just assuming they could sell things wherever with no oversight.
What an interesting point of view considering the discussed post. One of the main pillars of the EU its is single-market policy, you would very well expect businesses to be built on the premise of frictionless trade within these borders. And im not sure which market exactly you're calling "less developed"?
For any one interested in how deep these sort regulatory capture laws go in the EU, they can look at the deforestation laws on Agri. Pointlessly difficult for small farmers and medium and commodity traders to cooperate with demanding highly accurate coordinates for plots of land using specialized GPS devices and companies to plot the perimeter of the farm being very difficult to comply with getting the devices in place and plotting none of this actually stopping bad actors who simply lie about the origin of the commodities. I am some one who thinks environmental protection is important but these laws pretend to solve the issue while do very little and just add all these pointless tasks that become easy once you own lots of farm land like say nestle (though they pretend that it's the big players who are going to have a hard time). I deeply hate the EU but love Europe as a European, I hope Europe breaks from the chains of this pointless post war project.
If you are a small maker and looking for the loophole here, this is it: "PPWR excludes an object where it is genuinely an integral part of the product, necessary to contain/support/preserve it throughout its lifetime and intended to remain with it."
De minimis and the previous packaging regulations were used as a tariff bypass by Chinese platforms like PDD and SHEIN, which led to their crackdown over the past 24 months [0][1]
Let me spell out the loophole: Just don't use packaging. Redesign your product so it comes in a sturdy container that makes it integral part of the product itself and completely side steps the obligations here.
The socialist state of the EU is why god invented tax planning and the possibility to open your company abroad.
I've been doing business in the EU a long time, and in order to be successful you need to:
1. Never follow all the rules. Focus on your business and customers, and ignore/pay someone to deal with the rest if it ever becomes reality.
2. Start your company in a low cost, low tax jurisdiction. There are plenty of them in the forgotten corners of the EU, or why not a US LLC.
But I think the EU will implode in a decade or two and return europe to a state of innovation and profitability. The nationalist trend will lock any decision making in the EU, and the EU:s deep state will take care of the rest, enriching itself at the cost of the tax payer. The result... countries will leave or just silently start to ignore the EU rules, and then block any legal moves the EU tries to attempt at the EU level.
Europe has been steadily eradicating freedom and entrepreneurial spirit for the past 50 years. They will suffer badly many years later. They are slowly walking to disaster, but nobody cares. Go on, downvote me for telling the obvious truth :)
If you actually sell electronics you also need to register for electronic recycling (WEEE or equivalent) in each member state you sell to and the costs are even greater than PPWR costs alone. Probably 5x more at least.
Maybe we need to start charging the packaging materials explicitely on the invoice as individual items such as they become part of what the customer has ordered.
My impression is that the rules make sense. For big companies. Sadly there are no limits whatsoever, so the same thing that’s easy for big companies, is essentially impossible for smaller ones.
I’ve seen several smaller bands in the EU stop sending merch to any country in the EU not their own, because they don’t know how to handle this.
TFA laid out exactly how destructive it is. It would wipe out the 50% of Lectronz sellers who sell < 10 items per year, and thus Lectronz itself, not to mention anyone else (e.g., artists) who only sell a handful of items a year.
What wasn't clear? Do you not find those claims plausible?
What is amazing is that this goes so much against the concept of the EU. The EU was founded on the principles of four freedoms, Free movement of goods, Free movement of persons, Freedom to provide services, and Free movement of capital.
The EU even have a SME Test to maker sure small business are not overburdened by regulations.
Also there are thousands of lobbyists fighting for small businesses. Yes, this law will probably eventually be thrown out for small businesses but after how many years is a big question, and how many small businesses have lost there businesses.
And the law was devised by Ripa di Meana, who had been a member of the Italian Communist Party and the green party.
It’s hard to overthrow actual free markets. Small business is too sympathetic.
But if you pass enough well-meaning regulations and strangle all the small businesses with good intentions, it’s much easier to overthrow a crony-capitalist oligopoly of megacorps, which is exactly the end game.
that's why it only makes sense so think in broader terms, and a broader level regulatory capture absolutely exists.
the problem is that to solve regulatory capture in the EU parts of governments would have so go to war against corporations on the part of SMBs. but... governments in Europe de facto don't even recognize the right to exist of SMBs, basically _nothin_ of the large swath of government contracts fall to misc small businesses that would be perfectly capable to deliver on them at even 4x the quality standard corrupto-corpos do... probably there's some positive counteexamples in the weapons industry recently since we've realized we really do need quality weaponry at great value "by yesterday morning", but besides that... govs _HATE_ both SMBs and startups-from-unkowns (god forbit bootstrapped...).
It seems odd to blame lobbying (which you could also "rule of the universe" out of existence by saying everyone lobbies to some extent) when you seem to actually be blaming EU governments for being so hostile to SMBs.
Sometimes I wonder if the lawmakers in EU are brain dead. The whole point of economic union is that free movement of goods without custom tax and this new rule is practically a custom tax for each country.
at this stage europe is a machine for politicians to become wealthy through corruption, mass immigration, censorship, mass media control. that is why they hate X and are now fighting to ban it.
Meanwhile you still can't buy most food without tons of plastic wrapping it, unless you go to a farmer's market. The only problem this regulation actually addresses is not enough paperwork being generated.
My father had to give up selling cat houses from one smaller EU country to others because of the new packaging regulations. Hard to believe the EU has not foreseen this being impossible to deal with for micro-businesses. Honestly his friend who is doing Photovoltaics is also now forced to stop shipments to most other EU countries due to this law. I assume we are talking about hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
EU member states want all the benefits of integration without giving anything up, especially things that they consider aspects of national sovereignty.
* * *
I'll give you an example.
I'm from Romania. In Romania in 1990 there were no private enterprises, so everything was state owned. There was a HUGE demand for commerce/retail, so small local businesses popped up. They were very basic because everything was brand new and expertise was extremely scarce. No one knew anything about modern supermarkets, supermarket chains, banks, loans, credit lines, basically everything related to modern market economies.
As Romanian headed for EU integration, foreign invested started... investing. In retail that meant that because Romania is fairly populous by EU standards, everyone was tempted by a potentially big and growing pie that was almost void of serious competition.
So we ended up with Lidl (German), Kaufland (German), Metro (German), Carrefour (French), Mega Image (Romanian, bought by Delhaize: Belgian), DM (German), Cora (French), Auchan (French), Profi (Romanian, bought by Delhaize: Belgian), Selgros (Swiss), Penny (bought by REWE: German), etc.
I moved abroad somewhere close to both France and Germany. At a company I worked for, I had both French and German coworkers.
At some point the Germans were talking about Kaufland and I started chatting with them about it. Some French people mentioned Auchan and I replied to that too. After a few more replies about German and French supermarket chains, one of them said: how do you know so much about both French and German supermarket chains?
And I told them:
We're right next to Germany and German supermarkets stop at the border. There is no Aldi in France. Most French people in the neighboring French towns haven't even been in an Aldi.
We're also next to France and French supermarkets stop at the border. There is no Carrefour in Germany. Most German people in the neighboring German towns haven't even been in a Carrefour.
In Romania your big companies bought everything local (or displaced it), there are hardly any locally owned stores so I guess the upside is that I know all your supermarket chains.
* * *
Repeat this for banking, IT, whatever. Europe is super economically segregated even with the EU operating. Each country has all sort of hidden protections for its local businesses. I can't really tell you what they are exactly, but in practice you can feel them. Each country has its own version of X, Y, Z businesses. Small versions of everything, instead of few really big and competitive businesses at a global level.
This even impacts US companies. You can't get a European Netflix subscription. You fly from Romania to France and when you land and connect your tablet to the internet, your Romanian Netflix account switches over to France and they delete Mad Men from your downloaded episodes because Netflix France hasn't licensed Mad Men (old example).
Language, payroll-rules and tax-rules alone can be enough to prevent a business from expanding into a market. Even when there is no foul intent, just different set of rules.
I am from Brazil and it is not unusual for companies to operate only within certain states because of this. Even though Brazil is a single country with a single language and mostly federal rules about things, there is still enough variance of laws from one state to another to cause problems.
Then you hear about Canada which has tariffs between its own provinces, but not to the US. Meaning some products are cheaper across the US border than across a province border. Figuring out how much to pay in taxes alone can be a blocker...
This is not an EU-only problem, any large single market will have friction in its internal divisions. It tends to be worse in the EU because the countries have a lot more sovereignty though (enforcement agencies tend to be local, not federal for example).
EU is for all practical means not a single market, it's a hodge-podge of rules much more integrated in theory than in practice. Which is exactly the thing causing problems here, and ironically this is exactly what the anti-EU folks complain about. Think about this disconnect: complaining about friction and requesting less integration.
> Then you hear about Canada which has tariffs between its own provinces, but not to the US.
Canada doesn't have, and should not have, the level of ambitions the EU should have. We're talking about EU 450 million people (500+ million if the UK rejoins at some point) vs Canada 35 million.
The EU should go toe to toe with the US and China. The EU is utterly dominated by US software companies and by Chinese green tech companies (batteries, solar panels, EVs).
I feel for you, but the points you're making seem to be contradictory. You don't like that European companies bought out Romanian ones, yet at the same time you don't like that Europe has small versions of everything for each country instead of big mega-corps like Carrefour and Aldi? Or perhaps you're OK with mega-corps, and just want some of them to be Romanian?
> I feel for you, but the points you're making seem to be contradictory.
No, that is actually one of the points, I'm glad someone noticed it.
I, too, want to have my cake and eat it, too. This is a contradiction that can't easily be resolved.
I'd want Romanian sovereignty AND the convenience of big companies with lots of economic power. I guess, to your direct comment, yeah, I'd be happy enough with a few European "champions" out of hundreds being Romanian.
Personally, I lean more towards EU federalism so this cognitive dissonance is probably 30-70 towards big companies, because I think otherwise the EU will be crushed by outsiders.
I think this is true for a lot of Balkan countries that joined EU. I was in Croatia recently and was super surprised to see Lidl and DM stores there. Even more surprised to see the prices of items in those stores were almost same as in Berlin
I'm not saying that the boundary is a 20km high wall of fire nothing can go through.
I'm saying that:
1. the direction is mostly big countries -> smaller countries, and very rarely big countries -> other big countries or even rarer, smaller countries -> big countries.
2. 20+ years after the EU has started, the level of high level integration is still pitiful.
If I go into the Carrefour in Sallanches (FR) then I will buy a completely different set of products to those that I would buy in the Carrefour in Aosta (IT), the two are 80km apart, I have shopped in both multiple times.
I don't think the supermarket example really maps across to the subject of the linked article.
Yes, that’s exactly what we want. The single market should be finalized. And we should move towards having a European equivalent of Delaware corps, and unified systems.
Basically, yes. The EU needs a lot more power to force through an actual single market. Especially a single digital market. That's why the US is crushing EU tech companies. Licensing (especially content), patents, totally different tax systems, addressing all of the EU as a small company is basically impossible.
Story of European regulations. At some point you have to concede that they are incompetent and unaccountable. What do they care if they depress economic integration and growth in Europe? No one will ever be blamed for diffuse bureaucratic costs that drag down the whole Eurozone.
I even resent people giving them credit for "well, the idea was laudable..". No. Again and again they introduce make-the-world-a-better-place regulations, and whoever opposes these or asks about tradeoffs or whether they are meaningfully useful must be a crazed libertarian or industry lobbyist who wants to poison the people.
I remember how smug Europeans were about the American PATRIOT act. Who could be so stupid to be fooled by such propagandist framing of laws? Well, here in the EU that happens frequently. The commission just has to wrap its degrowth policy in saving-the-world names and off we go. (See also the EU Supply Chain Act, i.e. Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, aka expensive paperwork for a good conscience)
The article is asking for MORE regulation and MORE integration. As in, dear EU, please do not allow member states to make own rules about this, but make one from the central headquarters.
As an American and probably as most Americans you are missing the point that there are no "Europeans", stop saying that. The EU is just a bunch of states which happen to do some things together. And all those "directives" are guidelines for the individual states, which may, and more often that not, may not, implement it that way. Usually they don't because "muh freedom" (I'm sure you get the reference) so it's a chaos EXACTLY BECAUSE no European state wants to submit to some European authority, and even takes pride in doing things DIFFERENTLY, whatever the costs (economical or political).
The 'they don't realize what regulation does to entrants' explanation is implausible.
The bureaucrats are not naive and are perfectly aware that these kinds of laws produce incumbent protection [0],[3]. Even if they don't directly intend it each time, analyse a big amount of EU policies and see that they produce incumbent protection by effect (although there are some notable counterexamples, such as DMA; but DMA targets more established external companies even harder; so even here small player advantage seems to be just a secondary effect of protectionism against external competitors like Alphabet, Apple, Meta, ByteDance, which are dominant).
My hypothesis is that they're not bothered, because why would they? EU elites don't have a strong dependence on creative destruction, at least for the Franco-German axis. Elites are established beyond belief and can extract value in other ways (see below), e.g. in Germany it takes '6 generations for descendants of a bottom-decile household to reach mean income' [1].
So just kill or discourage anyone trying to penetrate the barrier, the really successful ones will open on, say, NYSE anyway and won't bother them [4]. EU can afford this strategy because it still has enough of a middle-class to control a consumer market that China/USA can't ignore, so they can extract value from both external companies (compliance costs, fees) and citizens (taxes, higher prices) because of the immobility of that consumer market [2]. So instead of removing structural barriers to entry, they just leave much of that structure intact and build compensating institutions on top of it (grants, EIC funding)
[3] 2 Fostering competition..., 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...)
My experience as a software engineer in EU was horrible. I wish I could say it was something out of a horror movie, but it would be too frustrating to watch.
I joined a major cryptocurrency project, saw its market cap briefly increase to $4 billion. I worked on it like crazy for 2 years whilst, unbeknownst to me, the founders began to sabotage their own project and ensure that it would slip out of the CMC rankings; I believe this was done to lower their public profile (and reduce scrutiny). But it all happened under the watchful, approving eyes of EU regulators. Also, the founders of that project defamed me and my team with outright lies to sabotage my spin-off project when we worked to improve the tech independently. I also witnessed other crypto projects which I knew to be scams receive funding from the EU commission, then the same founders raised money again after running the previous project into the ground with nothing to show.
This sort of BS - which is why the UK left the EU by the way, happens on EVERYTHING. By nature, the EU is an extra layer of bureaucracy which can only exist by: 1.hiring 2. producing regulations to justify its existence.
I have quietly seen it dismantle anything that worked in European countries, all while being called a fascist or far-right extremist for doing so. Well, here is the result.
If you try to sell to China, Australia, UUSS and Colombia and Russia for example, you also need to comply with the regulations of each of those countries (and pay Tarifs in some).
To ease the collaboration between humans the European Union was created. But the European Union is not a country. Is the earth only collection of countries that agree to collaborate together to levels no other countries have in the world History.
It's success is so big, that people expects to act as an independent country, and complain when discovering Europe is indeed several countries. WTF!
It's not the first. It's not even the first in Europe: the first was the UK, Belgium and Switzerland came after. There are and have been others around the world throughout history too: the CSA, the first USA, the USSR, the UAE, and the Arab League (just to name a few).
Most systems like the EU don't work well after a certain size. I don't know if we can say whether the EU has reached the point where it's unworkable yet.
The thing with the EU is that, worryingly, the less it works, the bigger it becomes (new memberstates, soon, Albania...) and the more power it takes on. This continent is heading for a catastrophic outcome and one must be blind to not see it.
That is not what the numbers suggest. Europe still leads in median quality of life and more healthy markets.
If you focus only on economic exploitation: Of course, with customer protection, companies can't do whatever they want. Of course business will develop less in comparison to countries where companies are free to do whatever.
From the title alone, I'd expect a typical think-piece from someone (possibly outside the EU) about overregulation, "the solution is no regulation at all", etc. Instead, it's a solid critique of the recent packaging/packaging waste regulation debacle, from a constructive angle. The first section hits the nail on the head: "a good idea, a terrible implementation".
Unfortunately, this feels like a frequent refrain when it comes to the EU. And even more unfortunately, even just this ever-so-slightly-more-nuanced take seems to frequently be drowned out by the two extremes -- "all regulation is bad and we need pure unadulterated free market capitalism" or "all capitalism is bad and we need pure unadulterated regulation" -- which are by far the two loudest voices in the room.
The OP has some good suggestions about this particular regulation (which should definitely be considered! Fix things are broken; don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater!), but I'd personally be interested to see things that try to understand and treat the root cause instead of yet another symptomatic regulation. Maybe walking further down the path towards federalization? Iunno, but if I had a dime for every time I've thought "good idea, bad execution" as an EU resident... I'd have a lot of dimes.
The idea isn't the issue, the implementation is. The EU did the same with VAT previously, where you'd have to register separate businesses in different countries, once you got large enough (which wasn't very large). Now there's a central system to keep track of what goes where and you can sell internally in the EU with no issues.
Something similar needs to happen here, where business report and pay to a central EU system, that then transfers the funds to each country. The problem is that the EU is smart enough to see the environmental problem, but forgets to think about ramifications and doesn't provide the right tools.
I was commenting on the title, the concept is sound yes, but doesn't call the initial idea into question, these measures are necessary to ensure a sustainable civilisation at this point, should be clear to every body really...
I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not), but I can share how it is done in China (where package volume is orders of magnitude higher).
China identifies "choke points" most packages pass: large platforms and logistics companies. Yes, Chinese e-commerce is more centralized on Alibaba/JD/PDD etc, but there are actually much more logistics companies in China than in EU.
They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow" (well, sometimes they do, but it's a different topic). E.g. the non-degradable plastic regulation was issued in 2020 to come in effect in 2025. This gives time to prepare and implement (unlike EU border controls mess...)
So now if something is shipped in non-degradable plastic, the logistics company is fined along with the sender. This is much more scalable and easy to implement. Logistics companies might rise their prices a bit in light of expanded work scope, but it would be peanuts compared to every individual seller.
Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...
But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.
>Could EU just ask DHL/Hermes/whatever to charge an additional €1 "for recycling"? Yes, but...
Within EU we already pay ~€3 for packages from China. And in Austria we will soon pay additional ~€2 for every delivered package. And 20% VAT.
Edit:
I am pretty sure at least some part of these already contribute towards recycling.
The goal here is likely not just to get more funding for recycling, but rather to use materials that can be recycled in the first place. Which you cannot achieve simply by charging businesses or consumers more.
This has nothing to do with EPR. The €3 for packages from China is a fixed processing fee on top of potential tariffs.
They got rid of the de minimis €150 limit for tariffs and added fees on top.
There was also €25 VAT de minimis limit but that’s also no longer the case since some time.
> They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow"
This wasn't introduced "from tomorrow", people had 1 year and a half to prepare for this (at least) or to protest this. See some comments below how individual countries actually messed this up.
> But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.
> I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not)
It's good that you take the time to just make assumptions about how the EU is bad based on your knowledge on how it operates...
It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.
People here REALLY love to complain about the EU.
Do you understand what the EU even is?
Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time. Just try to imagine it, because that's about as close an analogy as you're going to get. Now re-evaluate your criticism in that light, and understand that comparing a single state to a collection of 27 states is more or less a non-sequitur.
> Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time.
I actually think it would be quite a bit easier than it is to create the EU. There's a lot more broad cultural homogeneity between the countries in the Americas than there is within Europe. Even on the topic of language you've got the vast majority of all peoples speaking some combination of Spanish, English, and Portuguese. And Latin America has a bit more limited geopolitical concerns than Europe does which makes managing some tensions easier than it might otherwise be.
But I'm not sure why you are considering "it's hard to create the EU" to be a defense against complaints or criticism related to the EU itself. Maybe it's hard and it won't work and the criticism is reflecting that and others are pointing out that it's a flawed task to begin with for some number of reasons. For my own part I think it has been a fascinating topic and a remarkable accomplishment of statesmanship to even get the EU to this stage, albeit like anything there are some very valid drawbacks.
America does it with 50 states
That analogy would hold only if inter-state commerce was the responsibility of the states rather than the federal government.
And EU does it with VAT-OSS which was also separate in each country before. There's just no will to do this with EPR because there's too much money and lobbying power in the recycling cartel.
I mean that's what the PPWR directive is already? It's a single set of laws that applies to all member states. They just didn't write any interop.
Yeah, obviously we wouldn't try to do that. Our laws, cultures, and priorities are wildly different. By this lens, the main problem seems to be that the eu expanded too much and grew too large to actually have a coherent purpose.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
"people had 1 year to protest this" this is terminal stage subjugation to bureaucrats
Per downthread, this whole crisis arises because of Chinese companies shipping to Europe. The EU Directives are definitely visible in advance, none of this is dropped on people.
I think this directive was from Feb 2025? Is 1 year enough for everyone to register in 25 different packaging regulation bodies, appoint representatives, etc etc?..
I also fail to see how this will stop Chinese companies from shipping to Europe. No Chinese company will register in this farce.
> Is 1 year enough for everyone to register in 25 different packaging regulation bodies, appoint representatives, etc etc?..
Also, are those bodies ready for the volume of applicants? They certainly weren't when MDR came in.
> No Chinese company will register in this farce.
What makes you so sure? It really depends on enforcement but your Chinese company sure isn't going to just drop Europe as a market.
Exactly. I don't see how EU can enforce it against China, when most of the goods are imported from China. Or any other non-EU country, for that matter.
> this whole crisis arises because of
hmm that is not systems thinking there.. there are more layers than that!
Erm I've been talking about this for 4 years now. So I'm not sure how it can "come out of nowhere" unless you're paying 0 attention to really important regulation in your field.
There will be a post in 9 months from software companies crying about the PLD and CRA because their leaders were asleep at the wheel for the last half decade.
"in your field"? All small businesses and solo enterpreneurs that I know who are hit by this are not "in this field". Their field is making jewelry or knitted toys or something similar. Now many are just not planning to ship EU wide just because it's too high risk for them.
One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated. EU will pass laws, countries will adopt those laws, but you end up with 20-24 different versions of those laws. With some countries being strict or lenient about the law that everyone agreed to. And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part. Modern technology makes it feasible, but old ideas just drags it down.
Yes. I used to sell objects on Amazon in Europe. You can sell from just one country, but then each sale outside of that country is an "export" that triggers high fees.
For sales to be "local", products need to be stored in warehouses in each country. But that in turn means the owner of said products (the seller) has to be registered for VAT in that country, and submitting annual reports in each country's language.
I went to the trouble of registering in 6 different countries; in some countries, Amazon more or less helps sellers submit reports; in others, they offer to partner with local lawyers.
The result is a mess of reports, injunctions, penalties for late filing, etc. coming to you in Polish, German, Spanish, Hungarian. I eventually gave up.
Europe is not actually a "single market". It's a federated bureaucracy entirely indifferent (or hostile) to small businesses.
Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.
It's comforting to believe that large corporations with the greed of the rich and powerful is what makes these inefficiencies but really it's about a million little political negotiations, primarily driven by voters dislike of change.
Lobbyists don't do this. Regulators/lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
Is that with the One-Stop-Shop regulation or was that before that?
If it was before than, then the EU recognized the problem and implemented a fix for it.
I don't think any EU One-stop-shop scheme covers "local" goods sales in other EU member states yet, i.e. an EU company has to register in all EU countries they hold stock in.
That is changing with the Single VAT Registration (SVR) legislation, effective in 2028.
> And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part.
I'm not convinced that's an accident. I think politicians in Europe are just better than those in the US at hiding who they really work for.
There are numerous examples of regulations in many European countries that create a glass ceiling for anyone who strives to be more than just middle-middle-class, while creating effective loopholes for the wealthy to continue multiplying their wealth.
For example, the total (State + Federal) top tax rate for someone living in California or New York is not too different (maybe 2-3%) from someone living in France or Sweden. But the difference is that in California the top rate does not kick in until you earn north of $1M per year, while in Sweden or France the middle class is already paying those rates.
Likewise, in the US you cannot (legally) shelter your income by declaring it to be foreign income, as you can in most European countries. That is a tax dodge not applicable to the middle class.
And then we have the present discussion: The compliance costs are of course too high for any small business, so these regulations are just another form of regulatory capture to prevent anyone new from breaking into the upper class, while allowing those already there to have it easy.
> It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part
This is by design. It’s the same all over the world. The wealthy are not going to just let you compete
Laws are voted by politicians. Do you mean that most EU politicians are puppets of EU corporations?
EU politicians seemed to be fairly captured by corporations generally. Less so than politicians from the countries themselves. Voting turnout for EU representatives is very low compared with voting for local officials. I think its because people know that who they vote for as their chancellor or prime minister can make a big impact on their lives. They see the EU parliament as this distant thing and don't follow it so much. EU representatives therefore don't have as much accountability and can more easily be swayed by lobbying. How else can you explain the whole chat control thing which everyone hates but still keeps getting pushed through. Like who is voting for this a-holes.
It passed on a technicality of present reps voted against in majority but not enough total votes because the president had triggered a special vote for the last session before recess when less reps are present.
Was even one representative that voted for this from a region where the people that they represent wanted it by even the slimmest of majorities? I don't think so. These votes were in full defiance of their constituents.
The one thing EU politicians hate is disruption. Entrepreneurs are fresh entrants trying to disrupt an existing market. The politicians don't even need to be puppets. The fact that these small startups exist and may even succeed is reason enough.
Its not as bad as in the US I think, but yeah, most of the laws are actually (literally) written by corporations. I wouldn't call them puppets, but EU corps have an outsized influence on the outcome of the process.
I don‘t know about EU laws specifically, but national law in Europe is often written by lobby firms in favor of their corporate sponsors. In Iceland for example the main corporate lobby is called Viðskiptaráð, and they brag about the high percentage of laws they write passing at the parliament (in 2007 it was like 90%). I don‘t think things are much different in the rest of Europe (maybe just less obvious due to size differences).
That might be one reason they refuse to be open about their financial supports in their various organizations yes. it is very well known unfortunately..
It's usually US corpos that are lobbying all over the EU, it's unlikely that the EU automakers would have lobbied for their destruction
The entire purpose of EU is trade (trading nations don't go to war etc), trade is more or less defined by large corporations, it's through that lens every decision is made and measured.
Yes and mostly European elite and royal families. Royal families and their friends have strong power across Europe but they are well hidden via media.
Dunno about that. I live in the US. I can start a small business today and the only thing I'd have to do differently is file an additional form on my taxes next year. Yes, that's a simplification that doesn't apply to every situation, but it is still completely accurate.
That's pretty much the situation in the UK if you are a sole trader. If you set up a limited liability company, that's a separate entity and has its own tax reporting requirement, but nothing onerous. I am a sole trader, and manage a small company separately from that.
One thing I have heard of in the USA is the need for a "business licence". I'm not sure what that is or whether it applies to all businesses, so I'm not sure what it would correspond to in the UK. Neither of my businesses needed any licences or permissions to start trading.
There's no standard concept of a "business license" in the US either. Generally, the corporate registration / LLC filing is all you need to start doing business as a limited liability company, and you don't need to do anything special as a sole proprietor. Sometimes state and local governments have special requirements for particular types of activity, and require registration to begin operating in a regulated field. City and county governments sometimes have a business tax that you have to pay if you're operating a facility open to the public, and may require the tax receipt to be on display on your premises.
It is not the same all over the world. Starting a small company in the US is a breeze compared to what I’ve watched peers in the EU fight against.
Interstate commerce also seems to be vastly easier inside the US in comparison to the alleged single market of the EU. The most companies seem to deal with is California-specific regulations. Meanwhile, most companies in the EU eventually opt to create a ton of subsidiaries, basically one per state, to handle all the localized duties that the EU requires.
well said. like WB said, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
That is the issue across the entire world. Large corporations can easily bear the cost of regulatory laws, environmental requirements, rules, and regulations. They can also go to great lengths to promote an environment that is almost nightmarish for a smaller company or entrepreneur trying to enter the game.
They create barrier after barrier through their lobbying efforts. A good example is having to pay $50,000 for an inspector to come and determine whether your automatic door opens and closes properly, or to verify that your facility does not have a chimney. A friend of mine who owns a business in Niagara Falls, Canada, had to pay around $10,000 for a wind assessment to determine where chimney exhaust would go once released. He didn’t even have a chimney. They ended up having to have another inspection to verify they didn't have a chimney.
Many of these environmental laws are intentionally created and applied to small businesses as well, even when the cost of meeting the requirements is greater than what the business could realistically generate in sales.
The result is that large corporations can absorb these costs, while small businesses and entrepreneurs are often priced out before they even have a chance to compete.
Oh no. It's the mysterious "they"!
The US is wealthier, has more billionaires and has fewer of these barriers for small entrepreneurs. So no, this is not the monocausal explanation that applies equally everywhere.
(YES, the US has regulatory capture, YES the wealthy attempt to use it, YES we should try to eliminate it here too, but it remains true that it is easier to run a small business in the US, while having more billionaires. There are other explanations to the differential here).
Agreed, europe has a culture of "stability" first. The fear of disruption and chaos is larger after two WW and it outsourced the risks of disruption to the US. Basically, use the us as a test-mouse for new ideas and innovations, then when proven safe introduce them and ride those coat-tails to infinity.
> use the us as a test-mouse for new ideas and innovations, then when proven safe introduce them and ride those coat-tails to infinity
What actually happened, and continues to happen, is that Europe and the EU became entirely dependent on US tech and other foreign industry. It wasn't just a matter of "see what works and then copy it domestically". It oursourced basically everything.
Is fetishizing disruption good for USA? It did helped to create a billionaire oligarch class, but that class is literally intentionally destroying it. I mean, it may end up destroying Europe and the rest of the world too, but the US democracy seem to be their first target.
Even medium-sized corporations are not willing to send products across borders to consumers (say, outside Germany), further destroying the single market.
I think this is a big factor. While I would prefer a more federated US, the US as is is a great market to start in. It's 350M fairly wealthy people under mostly the same tech restrictions. That's a great place to grow.
It's important to remember that even without the fact that big companies basically write the regulations, regulations naturally tend to being effectively regressive wrt company stage/size. Every new one is a hurdle that a bigger company has more resources to overcome.
> It's 350M fairly wealthy people under mostly the same tech restrictions
and, on a case-by-case basis, those people are generally happy to adopt other states' standards in the name of convenience and efficiency (California notwithstanding). Look at E-ZPass/I-Pass as a great example of harmonization across states.
It's funny. Ask any Illinoisan how they feel about adopting Ohio's policies and they'd bristle. But say "hey we're gonna make your highway transponder work in every state east of the Rockies" and they're all for it.
I have to wonder if Europe has the same thing going on.
In the EU you have to distinguish between "Directives" and "Regulations".
A "Regulation" becomes "law" in any member state without modification. No member state has to adopt anything. Examples are the GDPR and the new Machine Regulation.
A "Directive" does not become "law" in any member state. A member state has to enact their own national laws to implement the directive until a given date. It does not have to be single law. It could spread many laws. An example is the Machine Directive before it was re-released as Machine Regulation.
More on the different types can be found here from the EU itself: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/types-eu...
>One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated
I would argue it's even worse, because with properly designed federated system you get checks and balances to some extent.
There are parts of EU that have almost zero oversight.
Can you elaborate more? When you say "checks and balances" do you mean explicit legal mechanisms or implicit mechanisms like Tiebout-style foot voting? For the latter areas with "almost zero oversight" seem advantages. Also, can you give an example of these low-oversight places and how it manifests? I'm thankful even for some pointers in what to search for.
One example is the effective prohibition on spraying pesticides by air, including drone. Drones allow lower pesticide use than current, legal practices
Yeah, this in between state is really frustrating. I hope we will see a push towards more federalization, but that’s unlikely
Living in Europe, I find that with LLMs, it is possible to navigate the federal & law jungle. However, LLMs don't protect you from institutional envy or the resistance of people trying to block progress simply because it is perceived as 'too modern' or disruptive. I find this the hardest challenge. And I have the feeling during times of general decline, like these, it gets worse.
Right, it's a zero-sum mentality versus a growth mentality. When people don't believe that growth is possible then they focus on guarding what they have.
And it's like there's a uno card that's "increase taxes for freelancers". And they sure like to use it.
I personally hate the "reenact" the old- good times to recreate the prosperity cargo cults. What created those prosperous times, where "characters" that would just do things, and ask for forgiveness by the law later. And that was actually priced into the justice system, by giving the judges a range to verdict from. In a way, the rule of law was much less strict in the 50s and 60s and way more informal.
Ah yes, let’s give the EU and its undemocratic system in which policy formation is heavily filtered through a relatively narrow professional political class, ordinary voters have weak or almost no direct control over major policy choices, dissent encounters administrative/economic punishment, and central institutions possess and use powerful financial means to discipline peripheral governments should have even more centralised power?
And no, just because voting for MEPs is bolted on there as a pressure valve doesn’t suddenly make it all okay when most of the real decisions happen behind closed doors and adherence to the passed laws, no matter how damaging is ensured through financial coercion.
Not a single person voted or agreed to this law, and yet here we are.
It seems you have an issue with representative democracy.
Yeah, that's always been my concern with the EU (I'm American, for context): the long worrying practice where the legal concept of the EU is assembled by a small group who very much want EU citizens to go back to sleep and only wake up once all the laws and regulation has been created.
A federation makes sense to me: I live in one. But how the EU has assembled itself in a way that seems to unrepresentative has been worrying to watch over the last couple decades.
> It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part
This was traditionally something that the UK was better than the rest of Europe, having carve-outs for small businesses.
The bigger issue in OP's case is they are dependent on de minimis.
The de minimis crackdown [0] and EPR [1] are both being rolled out because Chinese conglomerates like Pinduoduo (Temu) and SHEIN took undue advantage of that while ignoring European regulators on issues such as environmental regulations on packaging [2], dark patterns [2], breaching the Digital Services Act [3], and gacha/addictive engagement mechanisms [4].
All of OP's proposals directly conflict with the goal of de minimis taxation and the EPR.
Seems European HNers are fine with European regulations until it hurts their niche interests or pocketbook.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/102e18d7-d06b-4405-a347-97bb3c373...
[1] - https://www.vereev.com/news/europe-faces-trade-conflict-is-e...
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/ef72f186-2a02-4c51-927d-2c01ddece...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-says-temu-breach-r...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-probes-shein-over-...
The issue is that those marketplaces got too mainstream, and the average consumer is too stupid.
10-15 years ago if you were importing stuff from China you'd know that the trade off for cheaper prices is that you'd lose your consumer laws protection and you'd be on your own. If you wanted those, then you'd go to your local retailer and pay extra.
And then everyone started doing it, which meant that your local retailer isn't in business anymore (see local high streets in many countries). The choice you had 10-15 years ago doesn't exist anymore because everyone went for the cheaper price, and now the question is where the extra goes that we used to pay to the local retailer.
AliExpress and Temu would refund you if you complained about a delivery. Zero risk.
Means nothing though because no European country can produce the goods an impoverished European can afford to pay for the goods so the local store is just the same Chinese goods shipped to that address other than your home address.
This got downvoted but is basically correct. We had a great "grey" market, but the tradeoff for that is having to stay small enough to not be visible.
> It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part
There's truth to this but it's an overstatement as it stands. For example, GDPR rules are less strict for small companies.
Please elaborate on less strict rules for Gdpr? There is Record of Processing Activities exemption for <250, but if you have to comply with Gdpr (and you do), you need essentially same info as Ropa and of course it has to be up to date. How else can you ensure you are in compliance?
> old ideas just drags it down.
Are these old ideas? The broad regulatory apparatus in the EU appears very modern and intentional.
Because if the EU tried to force countries into single compliance, there would no end of "EU is trampling national interests" and similar screaming.
It's an unwinnable situation. Again, EU-level politics keep assuming everyone (corporations and states) are adults. Unfortunately, everyone are just a bunch of screaming, scheming petulant children.
>Again, EU-level politics keep assuming everyone (corporations and states) are adults. Unfortunately, everyone are just a bunch of screaming, scheming petulant children.
One in four MEPs are involved in scandals [0] ranging from harassment to organized crime and corruption. The European Parliament also remains a free out-of-jail card through abuse of parliamentary immunity, and they do abuse it [1]. EU politics is a circus.
0. https://archive.is/neTOG
1. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-parliament-accused-overre...
One of the best example is Ursula Von der Leyen. She was sent from Berlin to EU by Angela Merkle because when she was the defence minister of Germany under Merkle’s government there was a huge scandal of offering contracts (https://www.euractiv.com/news/von-der-leyen-admits-mistakes-...)
She was sent to EU so she can do less harm in the future, but the irony is that she became the head of EU.
MEPs in many countries do not actually have immunity.
However, the bigger issue is that european parliament is treated in many countries as essentially dumping ground between national elections.
> there would no end of "EU is trampling national interests" and similar screaming
To just call this "screaming" is to completely dismiss a real and huge problem. The EU is the idea that countries should fuse into economic areas, but the countries are also individual still. Of course there's a lot of friction.
For example, because Greece was in the Euro, they couldn't inflate their currency to compensate for the fact that they gradually outsourced more and more work to Germany, until they had nothing left and hit a financial crisis because their government couldn't borrow more money. That's not mindless screaming.
Do you realize that your example actually counters your point? The Greece's example illustrates that a misbehaving minority shouldn't have an outsized influence on the majority, which is a correct thing to aim for, I completely agree with you on that. But the current EU arrangement actually allows minority entities to veto majority's initiatives and improvements, exactly because EU is not fully federated. 1 member country can screech and blackmail 26 other members for any arbitrary reason, and they all must comply with this minority's ultimatum. If EU was a federation, majority would simply outvote any obstructionists.
So you've described Greece as a bunch of scheming petulant children.
"Our plan to be inaccountable didn't work, so we'll try a different scheme instead".
And yes, it's a huge problem. That's why I called the situation unwinnable.
They could neither fix the problem with the policy tools a country with its own currency would have, nor did they have the automatic support from a central budget a region or state of a country would have.
Greece could have fixed their problems by cutting spending and collecting more taxes (not necessarily higher taxes, but actually collecting the taxes that were owed). Currency inflation was never necessary.
> So you've described Greece as a bunch of scheming petulant children.
Can you quote where I did that, please?
No, the Greeks were cool and calculating, turning an inflating fake fiat currency into hard assets like real estate, while not working or producing anything.
The introduction of the Euro was the start signal for each country to try to inflate as much as they can for their own benefit - since the first inflator gets the best value out of the currency. Idiots are left holding paper currency worth less and less each day. Having to work harder and harder in a never ending spiral.
The Euro had a much better set of inflation controls than most of the previous European currencies. Especially the lire.
Including EC, and MEP themselves.
A couple of things to note:
1. The EU commission wanted a single central registry
2. It was the member states, via the Council of Ministers, that torpedoed this.
3. The EU now advises its member states to not implement/enforce this
4. Until the correction, which is on its way, can be fully enacted.
So the same old same old: member states do shitty stuff and blame the EU.
> member states do shitty stuff and blame the EU.
The crooked MEPs also voted in favor of this law. They are just as culpable.
Why would the implementation of this not simply be a fee that the mail carriers have to impose?
Isn't that by far the simplest solution that removes any and all bureaucracy for almost everyone and still catches 99% of the cases?
It's all about PR. If EU formulates the new law like they are fighting against pollution and plastic garbage, it sounds nice enough to the electorate who are content with greenwashing and won't investigate much. And 99% of population won't ever a hear a word about real issues by the sellers, to them sellers would quietly and imperceptibly start disappearing. But a direct fee sounds more like a tax hike and the same electorate ordering packages from foreign shops would definitely remember that.
It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
It shows up in the stats, citizens almost always trust EU more than their governments and want EU to have more power but all this means those local governments becoming less important and therefore no one is really pushing for it.
Fingers crossed Trump invades Greenland so things can start moving.
> It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
The lesson is the opposite: The EU needs LESS power, not more. If the member states didn't have a cartel to tyrannize their collective population, this regulation could never have happened. Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
Good point.
If I were a small seller I would just ignore this, like many sellers on Temu do. Before you get into trouble, someone must take notice that you did not register for the recipient fiefdom's protectionism racket. And if that happens, it is not sure that you really are in trouble. As with the GDPR, this kind of regulation is almost unenforcable in practice.
This echos the FCC rules in the US, which I believe are gotten around by not complying.
Even if you are not making an intentional radiator, and/or are using datasheet-specified layouts or modules, you still must comply, which makes these businesses non-viable if complying.
I believe Adafruit gets around certifying every device by declaring themselves a cellphone company and being on good terms with regulators. This isn't viable for the sort of businesses and people described by this article.
I'm not sure about the Ali/Amazon products. I'm assuming they just are not complying.
FCC allows suppliers to self-declare conformance with EMI/EMC rules. You’re obviously taking a risk selling stuff if you haven’t had it properly tested so don’t really know if it passes but it’s unlikely to really be an issue for a small maker selling low quantities, especially if any intentional radiators (Bluetooth, WiFi etc.) are already-certified modules.
Your device tends to need to be causing problems, that the FCC then go and track down, and then come back to you. That is (hopefully, depending on the kind of device) extremely unlikely.
As for Ali stuff, probably lots of it is not tested but still comes with a FCC label - but if it is shipped from overseas, who is going to take responsibility for it? Nobody… So there is nothing they can do except fine the person who bought it if it’s really causing problems (and usually I doubt they’d even do that if the user wasn’t intentionally doing something they shouldn’t have been, they are just told to stop and maybe the device would be seized/ destroyed)
> FCC allows suppliers to self-declare conformance with EMI/EMC rules
Yes, though they can also ask for your lab results or to inspect your testing facility and hit you with massive fines if it turns out you falsified your compliance documents. As you mentioned this is very rare though - even enforcement actions against non-certified intentional radiators are uncommon.
Huh. I thought that is actually the EU that allows self declared conformance, rather than the FCC. But looking into this it seems both do?
I recall trying to build some hardware in 2020 and getting discouraged because of the CE/FCC silliness. Even though I could self declare for the EU it seemed like a big risk to do so.
As a hardware guy it totally kills me, to get a fun or needed small time product off the ground and legally onto the market can require ~$250k of lab certifications.
Imagine making a mod for a video game, and to legally cover your ass, go through months of testing that cost $250,000.
Talk about killing a project in the cradle.
On the flip side, there are engineers who absolutely do not give a fuck, and will design their product with zero regard for emissions. To them the world is "If it's not illegal, then I cannot comprehend why I cannot take it to the extreme".
Adafruit sells boards as subassemblies, which don't need individual certification.
https://emcfastpass.com/fcc-rules-kits-subassemblies/
Putting that board into an enclosure and then selling it now makes you the manufacturer, and you must certify that new product.
PPWR is an EU catastrophe.
Firstly for the reasons outlined in the article: it essentially makes being a micro/small business in the EU impossible, if your market is other EU countries.
Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.
The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they just implemented. I can assure you it is difficult to ignore a law that comes with a €200000 fine for non-compliance.
> Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.
- resentment that bad policy damages the institution’s reputation - annoyed it proves people i hate like correct
Gosh I hate it when politicians are useless and incompetent, since it just validates the false populist propaganda that politicians can be useless and incompetent, which is clearly not true (even in cases when politicians actually are useless and incompetent, which they of course cannot be, since that is evil propaganda).
Politicians can be quite evil, but in a functioning democracy they need to be at least competent at gathering support and navigating the occasional backstabbing plots to make it to the highest ranks of government. So I'm hesitant to call them totally incompetent.
Exactly. Competent at getting votes (and taking them away from competition) and incompetent at leading and being in power.
Anti-EU regulation sentiment really seems to have an uptick in line with widespread availability of LLMs.
The EU isn't perfect, but the catastrophising I read feels mostly like astro-turfing attempts at destabilisation.
It's probably more easily noticed from inside the EU.
I agree. I say this as a eurosceptic myself. HN and Twitter make it seem like the EU is borderline third world that is moments away from collapse.
Germany is the third largest economy in the world. The EU as a bloc is the second largest economy in the world.
While lagging considerably behind the US and China in services, it still is among the leaders in energy and manufacturing.
It’s in decline, but it’s really not anything that can’t be fixed.
Certainly not anywhere HN/Twitter like to make it out to be.
The EU is facing a two-front information war. A strong EU doesn’t benefit the US, Russia or China. Having said that, a lot of US criticisms that are propagandised against the EU are mostly fair criticisms, the EU makes it easy for its adversaries to propagandise low hanging fruit (such as the bureaucracy on display here)
Stability - on the defense, is like goal-keeping in soccer. You can protect the goal 99.99% and still loose. And therein lies the crux! The EU does not attack, it seems to think that waiting for the old world to return is enough - basically a extended hibernation to another episode of good times.
But maybe this is it. Maybe good times, made via surplus bribery by innovation and innovators will not come around for a while. So what do you call a strategy that relies on something hopefully to come, that you are unable to produce or even articulate you need.
> feels mostly like astro-turfing attempts at destabilisation
Well it is certainly the perfect conditions for it, the EU is surrounded by friends and enemies alike who openly seek to break it up and the biggest companies in the world are doing everything they can to defy and undermine regulation efforts.
Yeah any thread on the EU is full with that on HN.
What do LLMs have to do with it?
There's no "catastrophising" here. This is simply an article that rationally explains why the latest EU regulation is well meaning but poorly implemented.
It just so happens that the same is true for a lot of EU technical regulation.
At what point are we allowed to say "the EU is failing to regulate its members effectively"?
Or are we not allowed to say that because it would create some kind of catastrophe where the EU Commission loses its power over the EU27 and Russia invades (or somesuch catastrophising...?)
This is actively preventing me from sending packages to other countries as a maker. No matter how small the risk is, I don't want to risk a 5000 euro fine for sending a small amount of packages to other EU countries.
Really sorry you’re experiencing this, that whole regulation rollout is a complete mess. The leadership should be sacked for such an incompetent regulation, it’s insane how much troubles they are creating for small businesses.
Another small business owner reported their experience in this Reddit thread, looks really bad: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1vrz88a/comment/p4i...
I’m as pro-EU as one can get but that’s a mistake we should solve asap
Do you send them as your business or as yourself? If it's the latter, then I would consider forming a business to take on the risk. That's not free either, but think of it as insurance.
Some people did the same when VATMOSS was introduced.
And those people were idiots. MOSS was trivial to implement and an improvement of what was there before. I implemented it myself for our company.
Do you not cross the street given the risk of being hit by a bus?
Fortunately, buses are not invisible and you can look for a bus before crossing a street to gauge and control your risk of being struck by one.
... but you can still fail to notice one, and you can gauge and to some degree control your risk of being fined.
In fact, if you sell 10 hobby prototype boards to other hobbyists, you probably have a higher risk of getting hit by a bus on the way to the post office than you do of being fined.
Umm akchully, not crossing a highway to avoid being hit is a perfectly sane course of action.
except he said "street" not "highway"
This is a great read and I can extend this argument really to any small business. Tax filing, VAT, bookkeeping, privacy, consumer, workplace and sectoral requirements frequently impose a disproportionately large cost on microbusinesses. EU is more and more split along the enterprise and VC backed line, and everyone in between has disproportionate costs. My barber in Stockholm often complains about this - the amount of money they would need to earn to overcome all these costs is staggering. So they often do lots of gigs on the side.
General view of EU politicians is that working class should be working for big corporations. Running own business is a sin.
The big corporations also don't want people to run small business, because they remove themselves from the job market and cannot be hired / exploited. So they lobby EU FOR regulations that ensure people cannot run business.
I initially learned about this from a luthier and plectrum designer, Hufschmidt Guitars, a one man shop in Switzerland. Some quotes from the update he sent to his customers:
""" For a one-person workshop, the result has been pretty brutal.
[...]
The numbers simply do not work for a micro-business like mine. Even in France and Germany, I send only around 1 to 2 kg of cardboard per year. In some other EU countries, I may send less than 100 g in an entire year. Paying annual compliance costs for one or two parcels makes no economic sense.
[...]
I have therefore decided to maintain EU shipping only to: FRANCE GERMANY """
UK has similar rules but, as with pretty much all other similar regulations, there are de minimis carve-outs:
≤ £1m turnover: no packaging EPR obligation, regardless of packaging volume.
£1m turnover + >25 tonnes of packaging: small producer obligations.
£2m turnover + >50 tonnes: large producer obligations.
The EU has been removing de minimis thresholds because 'China' can easily 'exploit' them. They're kind of right, but it's obviously an insanely stupid situation when someone selling something as a hobby, or just starting up on their own gets dragged into this.
The UK tends to be much more sensible than the EU and the main EU countries (France, Germany, Italy).
I agree, though it's not a very difficult challenge. There's still some nonsense here too like for example the TV License
I don't know but I highly suspect this law will mainly effect people drop shipping from China and will benefit companies like us who for moral reasons work to re-shore production.
When I get packages from Europe it's always is recyclable cardboard while from China it's always wrapped in plastic.
When I get packages from Europe or the USA it's always branded so the company responsible is always clearly shown, while from China it's usually brandless.
It appears there is space for "packaging and distribution in EU as a service" business model.
Creators, producers and manufacturers in many fields do not distribute or sell directly to consumers (musicians can't directly upload to Spotify and Apple Music; film producers don't upload to Netflix, writers don't print their books).
A small-time maker may pay a fee to the established distributor of the physical products, who takes care of compliance, and uses their packaging and distribution channels.
Good idea, except that the regulation (as I understand it) prevents this. The company sending out the packaging to the customer is the one who has to register. It's possible to hire consulting to set this up, but the fees don't go a way or get distributed over a broader set of shoulders.
As someone living in the tiny country of Estonia with just about 1.2 million residents, this worries me. No one but the biggest online shops in the EU will bother with the paperwork for such a small market. I'm expecting my import options to drop sharply in the coming years because of this.
The complaint is totally understandable, BUT the examples do not make sense. Arduino did not start as some dude selling less than 10 boards a year, but as an educational tool, which THEN ramped up to 100s of boards produced every day.
If your perspective is "I may sell 10 boards this year, maybe", your target is some local/national maker-faire, not a EU marketplace.
I think makers with such limited productions will just fly under the radar (if you sell so little, it's likely you probably won't need to incorporate or declare taxes in a lot of EU countries). If they sell 100s of products across EU, they probably have at least one over-worked accountant taking care of existing compliance stuff.
It sounds like a pain for any small company, not just individual makers. There are many small manufacturers of boutique equipment that could be sold at dozens units per year, and this would add massive bureaucratic overhead.
This is not new though. "We do not sell to EU end users."
https://pcengines.ch/recycle.htm
"... there are separate registration and recycling schemes for each of the 28+ EU member jurisdictions (and even a few of their provinces). What part of COMMON MARKET was so hard to understand for EU lawmakers ?
Since there is no single registration available, and separate registration would involve mindboggling complexity, bureaucracy and costs, we do not sell to EU end users until the EU gets their act together. Please order from EU based distributors, or as a business customer.
Business customers are expected to meet their obligations by registering in the EU countries they sell in. "
That was already ages ago when I did some sofware for them. 2007 ish if I'm to trust my Linkedin.
They make those directives that each member state has to implement and then maybe at some point they'll unify it at some point. This is how it was with VAT. It took them so long to come up with VAT OSS scheme, it's ridiculous.
Of course you had to register to VAT in each member state separately, but at least there were minimal limits in that case.
With EPR and WEEE you are liable from first item sold and now marketplaces are supposed to verify your registration.
The problem with EPR in particular is there’s so much lobbying and money in the recycling cartel now that there’s practically zero chance they will unify it at any point soon.
EU also recently introduced a 3 euro fee on all packages from China. Maybe well intentioned but it puts a huge markup, when a thinker wants to buy a very specific 0.05 euro spring from AliExpress or something along those lines.
You really have to wonder what Xi Jinpeng thinks of all this.
The extent to which China can appear to do nothing while the west kills itself is just unbelievable. How could you possibly respect people that can't get out of their own way so repeatedly?
These sorts of regulations are killing not just companies in Europe but across most of the world.
Unless you are a medium to large-sized company, it is very difficult to remain fully compliant with the regulations in most nations now - across fields, from packaging, to agriculture, to food, aviation..
I understand the package complains, and I understand how it undermines the maker scenario. I think smartly using the scale of things might be helpful, but they are targeting Qualcomm and not Arduino users.
Unfortunately, because all of us have postponed thinking about solving the problem, now we have a problem and braking is safer than not breaking at all.
In my country we do have advanced collecting systems but it all falls apart when different materials can be prioritised. There were an interesting proposal of having the companies to buy back the recyclable rubbish but that was scraped.
I was up to this. Because they would need to emit in the docs the amount of money the package cost and how much they would pay back, it was possible to track the sources from a fiscal eyes.
I think it was scraped because people already thought on ways of breaking it, instead of giving better alternatives.
I've seen some conflicting claims on this law and to me it sounded like it affects mostly producers of packaging, but everyone else seems to be complaining about it too. Did everyone actually read the law or is this a game of telephone?
> Did everyone actually read the law or is this a game of telephone
It's HN - everyone did the latter.
The terminology is confusing. Under the PPWR, a “producer” is not necessarily someone who manufactures packaging. The regulation also covers businesses selling packaging or packaged products directly to end users in another Member State. So a maker shipping a board in an envelope can indeed be the packaging producer for EPR purposes.
Having looked into FAQ[1] it seems that it's mostly the case if you sell in branded packaging and are >10 people or >2M eur revenue.
[1]https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/ad1...
I imagine what will happen in practice is that the makers will simply ignore the law and hope not to get prosecuted or audited?
I can attest to this. People say the Netherlands is among the best countries to be an entrepreneur. The visa policies for starting a business are good. But man, the whole tax system, shares, and holding management—belasting breathing up your neck—is horrible when I am trying to do firefighting. You never know when you might get hit by a tax bill. The tax system is built towards benefitting large organizations, and they can afford expensive tax consultants who can help them dodge it. The VC ecosystem is limited and not risk averse.
Having operated in multiple geographies, US is really business friendly.
It is possible to ignore laws if it's too much bother to comply with them... it's hard to imagine the authorities will come after someone for mailing out 10 anti-static bags.
The problem is that even this has a chilling effect on innovation:
1.It will dissuade some people from starting in the first place because it's one more hurdle. Even if in practice people don't comply, the existence of that complexity will dissuade some people.
2.Even if nobody is being prosecuted for mailing 10 anti-static bags, what is the number at which you do comply? And once you do, will you be held accountable for everything that came before?
That's a very American mindset. I've worked across both the US and EU at a variety of companies with customers, partners, etc and it's a clear pattern:
- Americans are usually willing to skirt the rules and figure it out later. This comes with risk but is ideal when you're early stage, low stakes, and you couldn't follow the rules anyway.
- Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book and will be shocked if you suggest otherwise. Being process oriented is great for high stakes industries where lives and safety are on the line but destroys startups, likely slowing or even killing innovation.
There is no floor to the level of "petty" that can happen here: the UK - granted, not the EU - goes after individuals who don't pay their TV license and determine the who by triangulating unlicensed TVs via radio trucks and inspectors looking in your windows.
The TV license is silly but the detector van situation is bogus, at least in the present day; really they just blanket mail demand letters to every address in the database on the assumption that everyone watches TV.
> Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book
Again on HN, I don't think conflating Europe and all Europeans into a uniform culture works. This might be true of Germany but as you get further from Berlin it is .. less so.
(Famous story from the Greek debt crisis of using satellite photos to find swimming pools and therefore people who were probably underpaying income tax, which was at such poor compliance levels the state was struggling)
Yes, it appears the "detector vans" are an urban legend/propoganda.
Even more fun, in the lead up to Greece joining the EU, they had to get their government pay under control so they were given monthly caps on what they could pay people. No problem, they created a 13th month.
* As detailed in Michael Lewis' Boomerang: https://amzn.to/4cXJnjE - He's the same guy who wrote The Big Short and Moneyball
Perhaps one explanation is personal bankruptcy? At least in Scandinavia/Finland this is an unknown concept. You mess up your business (Ireland has EPR fines upto 500ke) and end up paying company loans for the rest of your life.
Do they not have LLCs?
Of course, but when getting bank loan(for the llc) to get started you have to give personal collateral.
I don't think any bank will give you such a huge personal loan that you could end up in debt for your whole life, since they typically want the loan repaid. The only way I can imagine that happening is if you're a sole proprietor and you get sued or fined. I can't think of another way to get exposed to that much liability.
Most people are under the impression that those triangulating trucks can't detect anything and they're just an obvious looking enforcement truck used as a scare tactic, is that not the case?
I don't really have this experience. A lot of business I have worked with followed the "let's just do it and figure out the risk later" approach. In highly regulated environment it was different, but then looking for ways to squirt around the rules was the game. See for example the CumCum (don't blame me, it was called like that) tax-evasion scheme put in place by french banks.
Depends on what Europe you mean. Europe can be quite different depending on where you are. I wouldn't say northern Europe wants to do it by the book all the time like the Germans.
Quite common to view Europe as all the same, but Europe varies much more than what US does.
Do regular tv’s transmit?
The old CRTs do, yes. Not so much with LCDs.
But unfortunately, I may be wrong and bought into an urban legend/bit of propoganda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
I find this hard to discuss among others as it often results in heated discussions, but in my experience, Europeans have a completely different understanding of what is considered "rude" so much that I struggle to work with a vast majority of them.
That's not to say that there aren't extremely nice people all other Europe... there are. But I'm still caught off guard when hearing them say some things nonchalantly that would get them fired in the US.
> But I'm still caught off guard when hearing them say some things nonchalantly that would get them fired in the US.
I'm intruiged, can you give an example?
Not sure if it's a pattern but when I interviewed with an EU company recently, they explicitly asked if I was married and if I had kids. They explained it as they had a "European mindset towards weekends and holidays" and they expected me to NOT be online.
I was fine with the mindset but never expected to get those questions in an interview, as it'd be illegal in the States.
wtf are u talking about? some examples would be in order...
Likely not, but would you want the extra risk and the stress involved, that maybe one day you will find a expensive letter in your box?
It depends on how expensive that letter is.
Yeah, I always ignore them, first in my own country (NL) and after that in EU. Even if they fine (which they don't for small companies/persons), they will not spend money/efforts to cash the fine anyway, especially across borders. I had a few useless fines in the 35 years of my company, never will pay them.
Maybe it's super convenient for you in the moment, but the aggregate effect is pretty bad. If everyone just ignores laws because they're too much hassle and they don't expect to get caught, enforcement becomes incredibly difficult. You end up with loads of laws that technically exist but are only selectively enforced, which is a pretty serious problem.
How would you then have backpressure against bad laws?
Courts, lobbying (writing to your MP), campaigning, demonstrations, elections ideally. I know that non-compliance is the path of least resistance, it's just got really bad consequences.
But then you hit the same problem LLM slop exploits: the cost of refuting bullshit becomes way higher than the cost of generating it.
Great way for larger companies to knock you their smaller competitors by hiring a firm to vet they follow the rules
You risk that someone wants to make an example of you. You might run for mayor and your past is dig up and exaggerated
Don't hold your breath.
Sounds like a great opportunity for folks to sue you for exactly that. Same with the imprint requirement in Germany. There are people out there looking for small businesses without an imprint to extract some money from them.
As they should. As a customer, I want to be able to hold a business accountable, and the minimum requirement for that is being able to identify the legal person responsible for that business.
Yes, I too want the smallest Twitch streamer to have to put their exact home address publicly on the internet so they have no protection from weirdos and stalkers. If a post box would suffice, sure, I'd be down. But that's explicitly not allowed.
But regardless, kinda OT. I was just trying to make a point that ignoring a law isn't without consequences.
Yeah I'm betting on that as well
In the end, it's mail being sent.
And then there is Temu (as a platform). They've done all the necessary EPR/PPWR agreements with various European countries/vendors. It handles all the fees and reporting for Chinese sellers.
Yup, soon they will offer to handle the compliance for EU sellers for no risk and low and behold the idiots have given away a tax on selling in the single market to another country before they know it.
full disclosure: I'm a micro-entrepreneur and I suspended all orders to other EU countries.
The PPWR is causing a lot of buzz, but they are missing the main point for a market place such as lectronz. PPWR is only for packaging and shipping material.
There's something similar called WEEE* for electronics. It's when you need to pay a fee at the end of the product life cycle. This is very similar to PPWR, you need to register in each member state to be able to sell electronics. The solution is also a one stop shop. But Lectronz fail to also mention this. I would argue that this is an even bigger issue than PPWR since it's already in place. Even if the PPWR is solved it's still nearly impossible to sell electronics to other EU member states.
Someone has been sleeping when these regulations were being discussed...
[*] https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...
The new EU regulation on Digital Product Passports may have similar effects on small businesses.
I was expecting that they would build the "passport" on top of existing design standards but that doesn't seem to be the case, the recent webinar on it doesn't go into much detail though.
The reason for this mess is because individual countries want to retain some kind of control over the whole thing such as VAT/tax investigations and implementation of the laws. In a way it’s the “worst” of both worlds federated and individual countries but somehow still better than the latter.
Doesn't this new law overlap with the existing system? A manufacturer within the EU is already paying taxes, which in part should be used for managing waste. If they buy the packaging materials from another EU company, well that company is also paying taxes already. If they are importing from outside the EU, the packaging material pays taxes.
These blog posts often allude that the EU regulatory bodies are just slightly incompetent or short-sighted and these fragmented national models happen by accident. But unfortunately that's not the case: The EU pretends to be a single-market and almost mantra-like the EU officials keep repeating it. But the fact of the matter is that there is neither a single market nor is the European public ready for one. If there was a true single market (like the US has one) - then this would very quickly lead to massive changes in the labour market. Imagine all the Romanian construction companies suddenly building office buildings in Madrid. Or countless Polish architects suddenly undercutting the much more expensive architects in Milano. Whether they know it or not, Europeans would like to have all the benefits of a single market (mostly more competitive pricing) without any of the downsides (massive labour shifts) - but that option doesn't exist. So what they do is harmonize regulation for a few big corporations, while all the smaller companies (and their employees) still get to keep their national moats.
Odd that there not already is a minimum threshold in place.
This would even apply when selling a few electronic knik knaks on ebay?
The workaround here tends to be simple: Don't sell stuff as a incorporated business. Only do that once you cross a certain level of revenue.
But as with anything here in Europe, check your laws.
In most EU countries law, this one is also considered as "solid business", regardless if you are incorporated or not:
If you are running on a level with focus one some revenue, if you are doing it somehow regularly and if you have at least some infrastructure to look like you are a corporate (billing system, customer care or similar), then you may fall under corp rules, even if you are not acting as an entity.
>Don't sell stuff as a incorporated business. Only do that once you cross a certain level of revenue.
Are you saying to sell as an individual? People don't do that because if you ever get sued, it puts your personal assets at risk.
Is this not a business idea? Like register for packaging waste schemes in every country and sell it to small companies for some profit? Or doesn't it work this way?
> a fragmented national model
These approaches will waste billions upon billions of Euros for no good reason. Having different VAT rates per-country already leads to overcomplication in so many places.
Laws like this really need to only be enforced for companies of certain sizes.
In the EU some companies simply cannot grow because of laws like that. They might want to grow, but can't because of laws that says if your company has more than X employees you suddenly have to deal with a bunch of extra bureaucracy and reporting requirements. These companies purposely stay small, and basically has stopped hiring, even if they could use more manpower.
This has its own issues. Big bad actors can now split their activities between more smaller companies to avoid some regulation. I've seen it happening.
That's the tradeoff for allowing smaller companies flexibility to thrive without being swamped in regulations and fees.
that's fair game though. Either way they waste money on administrative overhead, which seems to be the goal of this whole procedure
That would just add tons of extra paperwork and a much larger administrative system to vet all the sizes of companies. IRL they will probably not even be enforcing this widely (like GDPR) but the costs will still be imposed on any business wanting to sell in Europe.
Selective enforcement is a tyranny generator.
How about the law doesn’t exist if it doesn’t actually make sense?
Selective enforcement is just tyranny, but what I think they were getting at is a minimum size enshrined in law. I don't think it's a great idea, really highlights how arbitrary this all is and presents a risk of advantaging the worst actors more than real makers, but it's a valid way forward.
Laws like this are a good idea but its too burdensome for small companies so it cripples innovations and small businesses. Only applying it to larger companies let's it apply to only the companies who have the largest impact and also can afford compliance, while not stifling small businesses. Not perfect but I think it's a decent tradeoff.
The law makes sense, the details where things don't make sense
Opinion: Big companies are (secretly) in favor of regulation, because it burdens small competitors to the point of failure.
Ain't it the case everywhere?
Anthropic is famous for routinely and openly calling for more regulation of themselves. They claim safety motives and their opponents claim that they're trying to pull up the ladder behind them. Opinion: They're both right.
as the whole world crushes small entities one has to wonder whether the EU would be the saviour or not. Apparently not. With its rules, they merely help crush small business as per usual.
I heard in the 50s an american could just startup a business installing septic tanks. But now the same person would need a myriad of regulations to be met, heavy equipment use mandated, all of which raise overhead to a level where its impossible to get off the ground.
I always felt the EU were the "good guys", IE not allowing corps to steam roll everyone, what with their rules fining poor behvaiour such as privacy violations, chargers being non standard etc.
However the same problem exists in weird ways you wouldnt even imagine.
For example if someone walks into a small "mom and pops" coffee shop and accuse the owner of "ejecting them due to harrasment reasons", that results in a court case, which can bankrupt the whole margin thin enterprise.
You might say, wait how on earth would a random troublemaker get funding to take a cafe to court, and for what benefit? For one its easier for a settlement to be reached regardless of fault that benefits the claimant than a long court process.
Now how could claimants have the resources? Unbelievably it turns out there are free national non profit corporations that will take any claim for free to court for situation mentioned above.
So what happens in the end? The small coffee shops cant survive but the larger corps who can afford the random payouts are fine, the competition seems to go away on its own and the claimants are happy with what amounts to random payouts for little work.
Please look it up it, and correct me if im wrong, I only know this from some little research into the forays of why small coffee shops find it hard to survive in western landscapes and risks, as I wanted to open my own coffee shop!
In summary, as always the road to ruin is paved with good intentions. So the EU trying to help a little guy in a specific context, ends up creating a situation that makes all small coffee shops non profitable.
I have no solutions.
> I heard in the 50s an american could just startup a business installing septic tanks. But now the same person would need a myriad of regulations to be met, heavy equipment use mandated, all of which raise overhead to a level where its impossible to get off the ground.
You can still do such businesses, but the red tape and other requirements are enourmous: health department and construction applications, soil tests, inspections, manufacturing requirements, and so on. The additional costs and delays are passed on to customers.
It's not just septic tanks, it's all areas of construction and one of the reasons why in many states (like New York and California) it's impossible to make low-cost housing anymore, or (like in Florida) new regulations governing old construction are leading to sky-high reserve requirements and condo fees.
There's also the phenomenon of people just ignoring the laws or bypassing them. For your septic tank example, in Alabama out in the countryside people with low cost prefab houses ("double wides") don't want to pay $10,000 to dig a trench for a septic tank, so they just run sewer hoses deep into the woods or ditches. https://www.epa.gov/septic/surface-discharge-raw-wastewater-...
> Please look it up
You’re the one making the claim, so please provide sources for your fantastical scenario. By your logic there should be no small coffee shops across the EU, yet this is verifiably and patently untrue.
You should do your own research and I don’t want to take up space on HN but I’m happy to take a look can you name what exactly you found hard to believe? It’s been known for decades small business can’t survive legal landscape as easily as large corps.
If you are confused by the statement there are no small coffee shops - are you living in Europe? From first hand experience coffee shops survive less than a couple years on any high street , yet there is a Starbucks on every street corner and it’s a well known fact small coffee shops operate on almost non existent margins.
> You should do your own research
Sure, but you should also understand that “look it up” is the escape words of every inane claim. “The Earth is flat, look it up”; “Reptilians are controlling the world, do your own research”; “Bill Gates is injecting you with mind-control chips, google it”.
You can “do your own research” and “confirm” anything. Which is why the person making the original claim should provide sources, so we can all discuss the same thing and not talk past each other. If your sources are flawed, it’s much easier to reach that conclusion if we’re all looking at the same thing.
> I don’t want to take up space on HN
Don’t worry, a few characters won’t make a difference.
> I’m happy to take a look
Thank you.
> can you name what exactly you found hard to believe?
Certainly. It’s paragraphs 5–8 in your original post. The claim that there are random troublemakers regularly employing free national non-profit corporations in the EU to extort and bankrupt local coffee shops by lying about having been ejected for racial reasons.
uhh no, if you're the one making an argument the burden is on you to provide actual sources and not say "trust me bro, look it up."
You're trying to argue how school children argue, aim a little higher if you want to convince people that know how to read.
Is there room for a company in the EU to spend some time doing the research as to what packaging is able to be used across all the different countries, then selling affordable packaging that meets those standards across the board? And also publish resources for how to effectively package stuff? A genuine question, I’m not from Europe. It just seems like something that would benefit everyone and help make this less of an issue. Or maybe this is the responsibility of the postal systems themselves? If you’re gonna mandate a certain way of doing things, at least give people the tools to do it the way you want them to.
Yes there are some middlemen , but that really shouldn’t be necessary. That becomes just a sort of racket business. The main problem isn’t what packages should be, it’s that businesses must get a license in every single EU member they want to send a package to. That’s just insane, and there is no unified portal. Some countries don’t even yet have a portal.
They'll get adequate feedback in the next elections If this doesn't get stopped, otherwise every business and their peers will likely vote for EU critic parties which means far left or far right.
Sounds a bit like registering and reported to each country's VAT system, which almost no online creators do (even ones making hundreds of thousands of online subsription revenue)
Is this killing the makers or the marketplace? Can the micro-entrepreneurs still list/sell via larger marketplaces? I can see how this is killing the micro-marketplace though.
I believe the view layed out in the article is wrong. The German Wikipedia has an article about the PPWR. One Paragraph is saying: "The distributor must verify that the manufacturer and, where applicable, the importer have fulfilled their requirements, that all necessary markings are affixed to the packaging, and that the manufacturer is registered in the producer register pursuant to Article 44." That does not sound like you are responsible for registering yourself but you need to purchase your packaging from registered vendors and you need to verify that. Sound reasonable to me.
Unfortunately, for direct cross-border sales, the regulation explicitly makes the seller the "producer" in the customer’s Member State, and requires registration there. Buying an envelope from a registered Greek supplier does not register the seller in Germany or France.
OK you are right, i looked at a different regulation. But, i still do not understand why i cannot buy pregistered packaging for the whole EU? Or why i cannot register in one country for all Cross Border sales. I mean there are minimum standards imposed by the EU and the packages need to have a mark. So why is it like that? Even more 1 years after the draghi report....
I'm sorry I don't buy this. A "micro-entrepreneur" should be trusted to design a product complying with the regulations of 27 member states but cannot be bothered by the packaging requirements?
My guess is that most of the products on this website simply do not comply with the norms and regulations they ought to, thus why care if they don't comply to waste management either.
You don't generally have to pay a bureaucracy tax to each of the member states to do business there. At some point we might as well just bring back tariffs and do away with the overhead of the EU
It's typical eco-suicide: give eurocrats more power and fake work to do, pretend most recycling regulations aren't scams, and practically destroy trade between countries in the union because you need one representative in every single country you want to sell anything in. As if adding a 5 (soon to become 7€) fee (plus tax) for every line of item (not package) outside the union wasn't enough. It is also quite obvious both must've been heavily lobbied by major retail groups through EuroCommerce.
Feedback for this utterly deranged regulation can be seen below, over 5k entries by many businesses in EU:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
And don't forget to fill in all the administrative paperwork on how your business addresses climate change; LGBTQIA+ issues; men/women parity; etc !
Is it actually a bad thing? From Asia I definitely see so much shady business practices from small businesses. Customer protection is non-existent. Keeping small businesses in drive prices down, but also drive wages down. I don’t think this is a compromise that many people would be happy with.
You're right, and this is also why we should only allow accomplished piano players to play the piano.
Small businesses result in innovation. There is little innovation from big business whose entire mission becomes profit maximization once sufficiently large enough. The little guys are that ones that come with new ideas and move fast to grow it. This is the entire story of startups in the US, silicon valley and more.
Big business also drives down wages way more than small businesses. When you are one of the few major employers in an industry, there is zero need to pay more while sucking in profit. Sure, maybe you could get an union involved but you are still subservient to the same employer who no longer has to respond to any labor market pressure other than quelling the union once in awhile.
I am from Europe and I think this complaint is misplaced. Europe is currently speeding towards neo-liberalism at lightspeed and shows no sign of slowing down. The beneficiaries are primarily the CEOs and big corporations. The workers are certainly not the ones benefiting from the status quo, especially if you look at the stripping down of consumer protection which is starting to look like completely absent in the continent. And on top of everything you have mass austerity, stripping away any social safety net.
However I do not see favoring smaller entrepreneurs over the status quo as something which will improve matters at all. It feels saying our problem is that we have the wrong capitalists. We just need to swap out our old capitalists, get new ones in, and hand them the exploited wealth, and then everything will be good.
What Europe needs is a focus on workers. Enough with capitalism already.
Workers need businesses or their is no work. Favouring smaller enterprenuers get more workers.
Businesses need workers a lot more then workers need businesses. And Europes whole deal is to shift this power imbalance in favor of the the businesses. This has to stop.
One additional problem is that this reduces options as a consumer in smaller EU countries. Smaller ships no longer are willing to take on the risk and bureaucracy of selling to smaller markets, meaning only a few, large players remain. Like Amazon, Temu, Aliexpress, or larger local companies.
FTR. The whole PPWR process started back in 2015, there was a public consultation period in 2020-21, the new rules were entered into force in February 2025 and now the general application happened. So there was plenty of time to prepare, as far as I can see. People that run a business in the EU and now claim to be surprised, they, well, surprise me.
You must be a fellow German. No where else in the world does the objection that bad legislation has been discussed (very negatively I might add, look up the results from consultation period you quoted) for 10 years have any merit on discussion whether that legislation fulfills its purpose.
So what if businesses "had time to prepare"? Its not the governments / especially the EUs job to waste the time of small businesses.
MISTER PROSSER: But Mister Dent the plans have been available in the planning office for the last nine months!
ARTHUR DENT: Yes! I went round to find them yesterday afternoon. You’d hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to pull much attention to them have you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.
MISTER PROSSER: The plans were on display.
ARTHUR DENT: Ah! And how many members of the public are in the habit of casually dropping around the local planning office of an evening?
MISTER PROSSER: Er – ah!
ARTHUR DENT: It’s not exactly a noted social venue is it? And even if you had popped in on the off chance that some raving bureaucrat wanted to knock your house down, the plans weren’t immediately obvious to the eye were they?
MISTER PROSSER: That depends where you were looking.
ARTHUR DENT: I eventually had to go down to the cellar!
MISTER PROSSER: That’s the display department.
ARTHUR DENT: With a torch!
MISTER PROSSER: The lights, had… probably gone.
ARTHUR DENT: So had the stairs!
MISTER PROSSER: Well you found the notice didn’t you?
ARTHUR DENT: Yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.
Do you assume regular people spend time on EU portals reading legislation proposals?
Yes, we are surprised to find out how foolish and counterproductive some legislation can be.
It also surprises and bewilders me that businesses (usually tech or tech adjacent) apparently expect and have for some time expected the ability to do business internationally completely without friction. Which is less something I think is a good or bad idea, and far more just simply an unrealistic one. If you want to sell in a given set of countries, I would think it a given that you would have to deal with the regulations and business laws in each of those given countries. The fact that you want to sell hacker/DIY products to people in less developed markets is admirable, certainly, but it doesn't change that. It's an unsolved problem precisely because it's kind of a pain in the ass to do compliance work across a large number of them. It's why large companies have entire departments devoted to regulatory compliance.
As far as I'm concerned the only way you could say this is "killing" any business is if the business in question has, as you said, spent the last decade just assuming they could sell things wherever with no oversight.
What an interesting point of view considering the discussed post. One of the main pillars of the EU its is single-market policy, you would very well expect businesses to be built on the premise of frictionless trade within these borders. And im not sure which market exactly you're calling "less developed"?
The whole point of the EU single market is to remove that friction
For any one interested in how deep these sort regulatory capture laws go in the EU, they can look at the deforestation laws on Agri. Pointlessly difficult for small farmers and medium and commodity traders to cooperate with demanding highly accurate coordinates for plots of land using specialized GPS devices and companies to plot the perimeter of the farm being very difficult to comply with getting the devices in place and plotting none of this actually stopping bad actors who simply lie about the origin of the commodities. I am some one who thinks environmental protection is important but these laws pretend to solve the issue while do very little and just add all these pointless tasks that become easy once you own lots of farm land like say nestle (though they pretend that it's the big players who are going to have a hard time). I deeply hate the EU but love Europe as a European, I hope Europe breaks from the chains of this pointless post war project.
If you are a small maker and looking for the loophole here, this is it: "PPWR excludes an object where it is genuinely an integral part of the product, necessary to contain/support/preserve it throughout its lifetime and intended to remain with it."
It isn't a loophole - this was done on purpose.
De minimis and the previous packaging regulations were used as a tariff bypass by Chinese platforms like PDD and SHEIN, which led to their crackdown over the past 24 months [0][1]
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/067ba5bb-4da3-42fc-a57b-9dd27a8f9...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-probes-shein-over-...
Let me spell out the loophole: Just don't use packaging. Redesign your product so it comes in a sturdy container that makes it integral part of the product itself and completely side steps the obligations here.
The socialist state of the EU is why god invented tax planning and the possibility to open your company abroad.
I've been doing business in the EU a long time, and in order to be successful you need to:
1. Never follow all the rules. Focus on your business and customers, and ignore/pay someone to deal with the rest if it ever becomes reality.
2. Start your company in a low cost, low tax jurisdiction. There are plenty of them in the forgotten corners of the EU, or why not a US LLC.
But I think the EU will implode in a decade or two and return europe to a state of innovation and profitability. The nationalist trend will lock any decision making in the EU, and the EU:s deep state will take care of the rest, enriching itself at the cost of the tax payer. The result... countries will leave or just silently start to ignore the EU rules, and then block any legal moves the EU tries to attempt at the EU level.
Europe has been steadily eradicating freedom and entrepreneurial spirit for the past 50 years. They will suffer badly many years later. They are slowly walking to disaster, but nobody cares. Go on, downvote me for telling the obvious truth :)
After so long living in each EU country, your 'obvious truth' is neither obvious or truthful..
If you actually sell electronics you also need to register for electronic recycling (WEEE or equivalent) in each member state you sell to and the costs are even greater than PPWR costs alone. Probably 5x more at least.
Maybe we need to start charging the packaging materials explicitely on the invoice as individual items such as they become part of what the customer has ordered.
As TFA says, the packing materials themselves cost cents and aren't the problem -- the yearly costs of registering, etc., in each EU country are.
Are these rules actually that destructive, or are we witnessing astroturfing campaign?
My impression is that the rules make sense. For big companies. Sadly there are no limits whatsoever, so the same thing that’s easy for big companies, is essentially impossible for smaller ones.
I’ve seen several smaller bands in the EU stop sending merch to any country in the EU not their own, because they don’t know how to handle this.
TFA laid out exactly how destructive it is. It would wipe out the 50% of Lectronz sellers who sell < 10 items per year, and thus Lectronz itself, not to mention anyone else (e.g., artists) who only sell a handful of items a year.
What wasn't clear? Do you not find those claims plausible?
"Since 1975, the US has created 7 companies worth over $1 trillion. Europe has created zero."
......... Yet most of the talent is here
What is amazing is that this goes so much against the concept of the EU. The EU was founded on the principles of four freedoms, Free movement of goods, Free movement of persons, Freedom to provide services, and Free movement of capital.
The EU even have a SME Test to maker sure small business are not overburdened by regulations.
Also there are thousands of lobbyists fighting for small businesses. Yes, this law will probably eventually be thrown out for small businesses but after how many years is a big question, and how many small businesses have lost there businesses.
And the law was devised by Ripa di Meana, who had been a member of the Italian Communist Party and the green party.
> And the law was devised by Ripa di Meana, who had been a member of the Italian Communist Party and the green party.
how ironical
It’s hard to overthrow actual free markets. Small business is too sympathetic.
But if you pass enough well-meaning regulations and strangle all the small businesses with good intentions, it’s much easier to overthrow a crony-capitalist oligopoly of megacorps, which is exactly the end game.
yes, and go back to communism 2.0. because that worked so well the last time it was tried.
> And the law was devised by Ripa di Meana, who had been a member of the Italian Communist Party and the green party.
Why am I not surprised. But to me the worse is the 400 something rubberstamps this crap got
Europe would rather regulate companies out of existence than grow them.
As usual, throwing babies out with the bath water
These things are going to be sent by mail. You could just have the postal service charge a few extra cents.
Regulatory capture in this case.
They need proportionality and size/qty exemptions
Regulatory capture doesn't exist. Only corrupt and/or incompetent regulators.
all people are somewhat corrupt or incompentent.
that's why it only makes sense so think in broader terms, and a broader level regulatory capture absolutely exists.
the problem is that to solve regulatory capture in the EU parts of governments would have so go to war against corporations on the part of SMBs. but... governments in Europe de facto don't even recognize the right to exist of SMBs, basically _nothin_ of the large swath of government contracts fall to misc small businesses that would be perfectly capable to deliver on them at even 4x the quality standard corrupto-corpos do... probably there's some positive counteexamples in the weapons industry recently since we've realized we really do need quality weaponry at great value "by yesterday morning", but besides that... govs _HATE_ both SMBs and startups-from-unkowns (god forbit bootstrapped...).
It seems odd to blame lobbying (which you could also "rule of the universe" out of existence by saying everyone lobbies to some extent) when you seem to actually be blaming EU governments for being so hostile to SMBs.
Sometimes I wonder if the lawmakers in EU are brain dead. The whole point of economic union is that free movement of goods without custom tax and this new rule is practically a custom tax for each country.
at this stage europe is a machine for politicians to become wealthy through corruption, mass immigration, censorship, mass media control. that is why they hate X and are now fighting to ban it.
Meanwhile you still can't buy most food without tons of plastic wrapping it, unless you go to a farmer's market. The only problem this regulation actually addresses is not enough paperwork being generated.
Seems like a problem Lectronz could solve for its makers.
Unfortunately, "Lectronz now generates roughly the equivalent of one modest salary."
You mean their proposal 3?
I assumed that the reason this article exists at all is because that is currently forbidden for some esoteric reason.
> The main idea of EPR is sensible: businesses that place packaging on the market should help finance its collection and recycling.
Wouldn't it be better to put the burden on packaging manufacturers?
My father had to give up selling cat houses from one smaller EU country to others because of the new packaging regulations. Hard to believe the EU has not foreseen this being impossible to deal with for micro-businesses. Honestly his friend who is doing Photovoltaics is also now forced to stop shipments to most other EU countries due to this law. I assume we are talking about hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
How is CrowdSupply, US based, managing?
Wait until Cyber Resilience Act kicks in.
Isn't this double dipping? Consumers typically already pay for waste disposal to their local government.
That said, the EU and West in general through corruption like to pass legislation that ensures only big corporations can afford to comply with.
This is a direct result of national politics.
EU member states want all the benefits of integration without giving anything up, especially things that they consider aspects of national sovereignty.
* * *
I'll give you an example.
I'm from Romania. In Romania in 1990 there were no private enterprises, so everything was state owned. There was a HUGE demand for commerce/retail, so small local businesses popped up. They were very basic because everything was brand new and expertise was extremely scarce. No one knew anything about modern supermarkets, supermarket chains, banks, loans, credit lines, basically everything related to modern market economies.
As Romanian headed for EU integration, foreign invested started... investing. In retail that meant that because Romania is fairly populous by EU standards, everyone was tempted by a potentially big and growing pie that was almost void of serious competition.
So we ended up with Lidl (German), Kaufland (German), Metro (German), Carrefour (French), Mega Image (Romanian, bought by Delhaize: Belgian), DM (German), Cora (French), Auchan (French), Profi (Romanian, bought by Delhaize: Belgian), Selgros (Swiss), Penny (bought by REWE: German), etc.
I moved abroad somewhere close to both France and Germany. At a company I worked for, I had both French and German coworkers.
At some point the Germans were talking about Kaufland and I started chatting with them about it. Some French people mentioned Auchan and I replied to that too. After a few more replies about German and French supermarket chains, one of them said: how do you know so much about both French and German supermarket chains?
And I told them:
We're right next to Germany and German supermarkets stop at the border. There is no Aldi in France. Most French people in the neighboring French towns haven't even been in an Aldi.
We're also next to France and French supermarkets stop at the border. There is no Carrefour in Germany. Most German people in the neighboring German towns haven't even been in a Carrefour.
In Romania your big companies bought everything local (or displaced it), there are hardly any locally owned stores so I guess the upside is that I know all your supermarket chains.
* * *
Repeat this for banking, IT, whatever. Europe is super economically segregated even with the EU operating. Each country has all sort of hidden protections for its local businesses. I can't really tell you what they are exactly, but in practice you can feel them. Each country has its own version of X, Y, Z businesses. Small versions of everything, instead of few really big and competitive businesses at a global level.
This even impacts US companies. You can't get a European Netflix subscription. You fly from Romania to France and when you land and connect your tablet to the internet, your Romanian Netflix account switches over to France and they delete Mad Men from your downloaded episodes because Netflix France hasn't licensed Mad Men (old example).
Language, payroll-rules and tax-rules alone can be enough to prevent a business from expanding into a market. Even when there is no foul intent, just different set of rules.
I am from Brazil and it is not unusual for companies to operate only within certain states because of this. Even though Brazil is a single country with a single language and mostly federal rules about things, there is still enough variance of laws from one state to another to cause problems.
Then you hear about Canada which has tariffs between its own provinces, but not to the US. Meaning some products are cheaper across the US border than across a province border. Figuring out how much to pay in taxes alone can be a blocker...
This is not an EU-only problem, any large single market will have friction in its internal divisions. It tends to be worse in the EU because the countries have a lot more sovereignty though (enforcement agencies tend to be local, not federal for example).
EU is for all practical means not a single market, it's a hodge-podge of rules much more integrated in theory than in practice. Which is exactly the thing causing problems here, and ironically this is exactly what the anti-EU folks complain about. Think about this disconnect: complaining about friction and requesting less integration.
> Then you hear about Canada which has tariffs between its own provinces, but not to the US.
Canada doesn't have, and should not have, the level of ambitions the EU should have. We're talking about EU 450 million people (500+ million if the UK rejoins at some point) vs Canada 35 million.
The EU should go toe to toe with the US and China. The EU is utterly dominated by US software companies and by Chinese green tech companies (batteries, solar panels, EVs).
I feel for you, but the points you're making seem to be contradictory. You don't like that European companies bought out Romanian ones, yet at the same time you don't like that Europe has small versions of everything for each country instead of big mega-corps like Carrefour and Aldi? Or perhaps you're OK with mega-corps, and just want some of them to be Romanian?
> I feel for you, but the points you're making seem to be contradictory.
No, that is actually one of the points, I'm glad someone noticed it.
I, too, want to have my cake and eat it, too. This is a contradiction that can't easily be resolved.
I'd want Romanian sovereignty AND the convenience of big companies with lots of economic power. I guess, to your direct comment, yeah, I'd be happy enough with a few European "champions" out of hundreds being Romanian.
Personally, I lean more towards EU federalism so this cognitive dissonance is probably 30-70 towards big companies, because I think otherwise the EU will be crushed by outsiders.
I think this is true for a lot of Balkan countries that joined EU. I was in Croatia recently and was super surprised to see Lidl and DM stores there. Even more surprised to see the prices of items in those stores were almost same as in Berlin
Don't know about Carrefour and Auchan in Germany, but there are plenty of Aldis and Lidls in France, at least in the Paris region.
Very interesting! Also, I would trade Aldi for Carrefour in less than a second.
They aren't in the same category of supermarket though.
Anyway, your name sounds Dutch. Please bring Albert Heijn to Germany. I'm not even sure why, but it's my favorite supermarket I've been to so far.
That's true. I'd trade Lidl for Carrefour then. I like Albert Heijn too. It's like a successful mix of the grocery store tiers.
There are ALDI stores in France, I don't know which ALDI without looking it up. Carrefour has stores in Italy and Spain.
> Carrefour has stores in Italy and Spain.
And Auchan has stores in Spain (Alcampo).
I'm not saying that the boundary is a 20km high wall of fire nothing can go through.
I'm saying that:
1. the direction is mostly big countries -> smaller countries, and very rarely big countries -> other big countries or even rarer, smaller countries -> big countries.
2. 20+ years after the EU has started, the level of high level integration is still pitiful.
People don't want complete integration.
If I go into the Carrefour in Sallanches (FR) then I will buy a completely different set of products to those that I would buy in the Carrefour in Aosta (IT), the two are 80km apart, I have shopped in both multiple times.
I don't think the supermarket example really maps across to the subject of the linked article.
There are a lot of Aldi in France (also Lidl, also Action (Netherlands)...) Not sure of your point.
TL;DR in EU, "strong" countries protected their national companies; weaker or smaller ones didn't
=> short term gain, free profits for eg FR or DE companies being allowed to devour other smaller countrie's markets
=> big country corpos get used to "almost free lunch"
=> big EU corpos fail to innovated and become uncompetitive globally
=> US ans CN corpos try instead to come with their increased efficiency and innovation at the EU market
=> EU freaks out and throws random restrictions and fines and regulations
=> only the most aggressive and ruthless CN (Temu etc) and US companies get through
=> they mostly rape the s out of EU markets
=> EU tries to protect its markets but its institutions have been regulatorly captured
=> [dark spiral goes on and on...]
Whining on the order hand is always easy.
So, the complain is that there is no harmonization and you want more centralized harmonization, basically?
Yes, that’s exactly what we want. The single market should be finalized. And we should move towards having a European equivalent of Delaware corps, and unified systems.
Basically, yes. The EU needs a lot more power to force through an actual single market. Especially a single digital market. That's why the US is crushing EU tech companies. Licensing (especially content), patents, totally different tax systems, addressing all of the EU as a small company is basically impossible.
Except that US also has pretty fragmented state law, doesn't it?
Not anything like this. The closest thing is charging local sales tax.
Environmental laws ("The California Effect"), payroll laws, payment laws, rules about what to sell and where are also different, aren't they?
> A good idea, a terrible implementation
Story of European regulations. At some point you have to concede that they are incompetent and unaccountable. What do they care if they depress economic integration and growth in Europe? No one will ever be blamed for diffuse bureaucratic costs that drag down the whole Eurozone.
I even resent people giving them credit for "well, the idea was laudable..". No. Again and again they introduce make-the-world-a-better-place regulations, and whoever opposes these or asks about tradeoffs or whether they are meaningfully useful must be a crazed libertarian or industry lobbyist who wants to poison the people.
I remember how smug Europeans were about the American PATRIOT act. Who could be so stupid to be fooled by such propagandist framing of laws? Well, here in the EU that happens frequently. The commission just has to wrap its degrowth policy in saving-the-world names and off we go. (See also the EU Supply Chain Act, i.e. Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, aka expensive paperwork for a good conscience)
The article is asking for MORE regulation and MORE integration. As in, dear EU, please do not allow member states to make own rules about this, but make one from the central headquarters.
As an American and probably as most Americans you are missing the point that there are no "Europeans", stop saying that. The EU is just a bunch of states which happen to do some things together. And all those "directives" are guidelines for the individual states, which may, and more often that not, may not, implement it that way. Usually they don't because "muh freedom" (I'm sure you get the reference) so it's a chaos EXACTLY BECAUSE no European state wants to submit to some European authority, and even takes pride in doing things DIFFERENTLY, whatever the costs (economical or political).
The 'they don't realize what regulation does to entrants' explanation is implausible.
The bureaucrats are not naive and are perfectly aware that these kinds of laws produce incumbent protection [0],[3]. Even if they don't directly intend it each time, analyse a big amount of EU policies and see that they produce incumbent protection by effect (although there are some notable counterexamples, such as DMA; but DMA targets more established external companies even harder; so even here small player advantage seems to be just a secondary effect of protectionism against external competitors like Alphabet, Apple, Meta, ByteDance, which are dominant).
My hypothesis is that they're not bothered, because why would they? EU elites don't have a strong dependence on creative destruction, at least for the Franco-German axis. Elites are established beyond belief and can extract value in other ways (see below), e.g. in Germany it takes '6 generations for descendants of a bottom-decile household to reach mean income' [1].
So just kill or discourage anyone trying to penetrate the barrier, the really successful ones will open on, say, NYSE anyway and won't bother them [4]. EU can afford this strategy because it still has enough of a middle-class to control a consumer market that China/USA can't ignore, so they can extract value from both external companies (compliance costs, fees) and citizens (taxes, higher prices) because of the immobility of that consumer market [2]. So instead of removing structural barriers to entry, they just leave much of that structure intact and build compensating institutions on top of it (grants, EIC funding)
[0] TOOL #22. THE "SME TEST": https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/5d2011d7-5470...
[1] 'Mobility patterns...' https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/book/36491
[3] 2 Fostering competition..., 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...)
[4] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2024/146/arti... e.g. 'Looking at EU startup exits through IPOs, two-thirds occurred outside the EU in 2023'
For the last time EU!= Europe, there are plenty more countries outside Brussels overach ffs
My experience as a software engineer in EU was horrible. I wish I could say it was something out of a horror movie, but it would be too frustrating to watch.
I joined a major cryptocurrency project, saw its market cap briefly increase to $4 billion. I worked on it like crazy for 2 years whilst, unbeknownst to me, the founders began to sabotage their own project and ensure that it would slip out of the CMC rankings; I believe this was done to lower their public profile (and reduce scrutiny). But it all happened under the watchful, approving eyes of EU regulators. Also, the founders of that project defamed me and my team with outright lies to sabotage my spin-off project when we worked to improve the tech independently. I also witnessed other crypto projects which I knew to be scams receive funding from the EU commission, then the same founders raised money again after running the previous project into the ground with nothing to show.
This sort of BS - which is why the UK left the EU by the way, happens on EVERYTHING. By nature, the EU is an extra layer of bureaucracy which can only exist by: 1.hiring 2. producing regulations to justify its existence. I have quietly seen it dismantle anything that worked in European countries, all while being called a fascist or far-right extremist for doing so. Well, here is the result.
How much bullshit!
If you try to sell to China, Australia, UUSS and Colombia and Russia for example, you also need to comply with the regulations of each of those countries (and pay Tarifs in some).
To ease the collaboration between humans the European Union was created. But the European Union is not a country. Is the earth only collection of countries that agree to collaborate together to levels no other countries have in the world History.
It's success is so big, that people expects to act as an independent country, and complain when discovering Europe is indeed several countries. WTF!
It's not the first. It's not even the first in Europe: the first was the UK, Belgium and Switzerland came after. There are and have been others around the world throughout history too: the CSA, the first USA, the USSR, the UAE, and the Arab League (just to name a few).
Most systems like the EU don't work well after a certain size. I don't know if we can say whether the EU has reached the point where it's unworkable yet.
The thing with the EU is that, worryingly, the less it works, the bigger it becomes (new memberstates, soon, Albania...) and the more power it takes on. This continent is heading for a catastrophic outcome and one must be blind to not see it.
That is not what the numbers suggest. Europe still leads in median quality of life and more healthy markets.
If you focus only on economic exploitation: Of course, with customer protection, companies can't do whatever they want. Of course business will develop less in comparison to countries where companies are free to do whatever.
Unfortunate choice of words, implies these people are being literally murdered...
Good post, bad title.
From the title alone, I'd expect a typical think-piece from someone (possibly outside the EU) about overregulation, "the solution is no regulation at all", etc. Instead, it's a solid critique of the recent packaging/packaging waste regulation debacle, from a constructive angle. The first section hits the nail on the head: "a good idea, a terrible implementation".
Unfortunately, this feels like a frequent refrain when it comes to the EU. And even more unfortunately, even just this ever-so-slightly-more-nuanced take seems to frequently be drowned out by the two extremes -- "all regulation is bad and we need pure unadulterated free market capitalism" or "all capitalism is bad and we need pure unadulterated regulation" -- which are by far the two loudest voices in the room.
The OP has some good suggestions about this particular regulation (which should definitely be considered! Fix things are broken; don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater!), but I'd personally be interested to see things that try to understand and treat the root cause instead of yet another symptomatic regulation. Maybe walking further down the path towards federalization? Iunno, but if I had a dime for every time I've thought "good idea, bad execution" as an EU resident... I'd have a lot of dimes.
Well, maybe if anything coming from the EU is "good idea, bad execution", the solution should be to get rid of this bureaucracy altogether then.
It's funny, because what's actually, literally killing people is pollution...
The idea isn't the issue, the implementation is. The EU did the same with VAT previously, where you'd have to register separate businesses in different countries, once you got large enough (which wasn't very large). Now there's a central system to keep track of what goes where and you can sell internally in the EU with no issues.
Something similar needs to happen here, where business report and pay to a central EU system, that then transfers the funds to each country. The problem is that the EU is smart enough to see the environmental problem, but forgets to think about ramifications and doesn't provide the right tools.
I was commenting on the title, the concept is sound yes, but doesn't call the initial idea into question, these measures are necessary to ensure a sustainable civilisation at this point, should be clear to every body really...
In Europe air pollution, while much higher than the United States, is at a hundred year low.
slightly off topic wouldn't you say?
Is it literally killing the majority of Europeans? How many deaths comes from an Arduino box?
Europe's smart people are going to have to move to another country to be entrepreneurs. That's going to kill Europe faster.
> Europe's smart people are going to have to move to another country to be entrepreneurs
Watch the stats please, the contrary is happening right now, plenty of American talents coming to Europe.
>Watch the stats please, the contrary is happening right now, plenty of American talents coming to Europe.
No they're not. Plenty of European talents are still coming to the US.
Besides, millions of MENA migrants in Europe are all doctors, engineers, and lawyers! No need for the Americans.
It's funny how racists are the most cowards mfs around, with their repertoire of 5 "coded language" stuff they repeat ad nauseam...
They're probably not coming to be entrepreneurs though.
Please share said stats with us
https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/how-much-research-talent-co... for an analysis and https://www.euractiv.com/opinion/europes-battle-for-american...
Nothing definitive but it's still early in the exodus