"Regulation often helps Big Industry remain entrenched in power. The burdensome costs of complying with any new regulation would be a rounding error for the likes of Facebook and Google, but it might completely destroy a promising start-up poised to challenge their dominance"
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Kirk is flipping the usual morality play of regulation on its head: instead of government reining in corporate power, it becomes a quiet accomplice to it. The line is built to land with a certain kind of populist indignation: you think youre punishing the giants, but youre actually handing them a moat.
The specific intent is strategic. By foregrounding Facebook and Google, he borrows the publics existing suspicion of Big Tech, then redirects that suspicion toward regulators. Regulation becomes less a safeguard than a weapon of incumbency, a claim that lets anti-regulatory politics wear the costume of pro-competition reform. Its a clever rhetorical judo move: the argument doesnt defend Big Industry; it indicts it, while still arriving at the deregulatory destination.
The subtext is that bureaucracy is structurally biased toward scale. Compliance costs are not just money; they are time, legal staff, specialized expertise, relationships with agencies. A start-up doesnt just pay more proportionally; it gets pulled off product work and into paperwork, while incumbents amortize the hassle across global revenue. That frames regulation as a kind of regressive tax on ambition, with the comforting villains already supplied.
Context matters: this is a post-financial-crisis, post-privacy-scandal era where distrust runs in two directions at once, toward corporations and toward the state. Kirk is tapping that double cynicism. The argument also gestures at a real phenomenon regulatory capture and barrier-to-entry effects but it conveniently leaves out the other half: in lightly regulated markets, dominant firms can entrench themselves by other means (data advantages, network effects, predatory acquisition). The point isnt to map the whole landscape; its to make regulation sound like the elites favorite tool.
The specific intent is strategic. By foregrounding Facebook and Google, he borrows the publics existing suspicion of Big Tech, then redirects that suspicion toward regulators. Regulation becomes less a safeguard than a weapon of incumbency, a claim that lets anti-regulatory politics wear the costume of pro-competition reform. Its a clever rhetorical judo move: the argument doesnt defend Big Industry; it indicts it, while still arriving at the deregulatory destination.
The subtext is that bureaucracy is structurally biased toward scale. Compliance costs are not just money; they are time, legal staff, specialized expertise, relationships with agencies. A start-up doesnt just pay more proportionally; it gets pulled off product work and into paperwork, while incumbents amortize the hassle across global revenue. That frames regulation as a kind of regressive tax on ambition, with the comforting villains already supplied.
Context matters: this is a post-financial-crisis, post-privacy-scandal era where distrust runs in two directions at once, toward corporations and toward the state. Kirk is tapping that double cynicism. The argument also gestures at a real phenomenon regulatory capture and barrier-to-entry effects but it conveniently leaves out the other half: in lightly regulated markets, dominant firms can entrench themselves by other means (data advantages, network effects, predatory acquisition). The point isnt to map the whole landscape; its to make regulation sound like the elites favorite tool.
Quote Details
| Topic | Startup |
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