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Comment by _vbnz | Hacker News Reader

More useless bureaucracy that will harm start-ups (and side-projects becoming proto-startups).

I don't understand why people want more bureaucracy, it never works out well. Now the established companies like SAP will just pay expensive lawyers to check boxes for the certification, and European startups will face another massive obstacle (just like the GDPR, Cookie law, etc.)

A better law would be pushing for repairability - ban locked down bootloaders and closed firmware, force published schematics, component lists and replacements, open bootloaders, etc. - this would help solve a lot of electronic waste and also drive a new sector for startups.

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I don't understand why people want more bureaucracy, it never works out well.

I don't think I even need to list counter-examples to falsify this statement. Sure, we all remember examples of bureaucracy gone wrong, and get amnesia when we step onto an airplane.

As to the topic at hand, I dunno, a mostly-unregulated industry as it is now has such egregious examples that I'd be willing to see how this goes.

That's nice, but my side-project isn't a passenger airline.

This will just kill innovation and startups in the EU. It's already a nightmare of bureaucracy for taxes and permits, etc.

First we're all akin to lawyers and doctors, now each software developer is effectively working to build an airplane...

Everyone here seems to forget that we regulate these industries so finely because they are in a uniquely dangerous position to harm people, and act as if this is a blanket statement that's true for any kind of software development. This is most definitely not true, and we should think hard and long before regulating a thriving industry out of the world in order to feel superior to all those rubes over there obviously doing it wrong.

Regulation is a necessary evil, not a positive good in itself.

Customers who care about their data care that it's protected regardless of the size of the business. They care about availability regardless of the size of business.

If customers could make more informed decisions about these risks, i.e. if they could get access to company intellectual property and privileged information about operations, maybe we wouldn't need to consider this type of of legislation. But customers continue to be on the end of information asymmetry about company operations, so now customers need other ways to find protection. Maybe it's the case that there are economies of scale to resilience, and we have to accept some level of difficulty to disrupt because of that.

Yes, as a bootstrapped lifestyle startup founder, I have no idea how I would comply with this if I were serving Europe. I can see this limiting European startup founders to the independently wealthy or those who can get VC funding.

Meanwhile, large corporations who can easily afford the lawyers will further entrench their monopolies.

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