Posted by l-one-lone 8 hours ago
None of this applies to companies that are micro-enterprises or use generic rather than branded packaging. There's a helpful diagram on page 13. The author of this article seems to have imagined a worst-case scenario based on either a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the EU rules; the discussion here seems to have a lot of people who are in a big rush to demonize their perceived political opponents on ideological grounds.
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.
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.
Yes, the point is, pay +€1 for packages from EU to EU to finance all this PPWR circus.
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.
Having said that, the customs duty will go to the EU budget so there's now a direct incentive for the EU to maintain or perhaps even increase this.
The amount of shit that gets shipped from China to Europe (world) is fucking ludicrous, and people should be taxed heavily for the stupid shit they often don't need.
Preferably somewhere where it’s cheaper than the value of the thing being repaired.
The reason the price for parcels from China is going up in Europe is not shipping chips or component, it's from shipping stupid fucking shit people do not need, from e.g Temu and copied goods such as clothing, shoes and what not.
The toll offices in the airports are being drowned in cheap crap. Shut it down by making people pay more for the shit they buy. That will of course hurt everyone else, but that is how it works.
The economic concept implies that we're going to have an evidence-based discussion about how we're tracking specific dollar cost amounts of pollution or something, and then in practice that essentially never happens and it's just "I've decided you don't really need that thing you want"
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...
So no, it's not EU's ruling, but their idiot member states. As usual. And of course, everybody points to the usual scapegoat, regardless of the truth. And probably the truth is, that those specific member states wanted this mess.
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.
[1] https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-market_en
And it is! People here are always complaining about the EU as if it's a single state, even though it's very clearly in the process of becoming one. It's a long road, we're not sure if we're going to make it all the way to the finish line (but I suspect we will), and we're going to have some happy little (and big) mistakes along the way. But for now it's imperfect, and it might be imperfect for a very long time to come. It's still a lot better than not having it, and we're actively working on improving it.
Rather: if you look at what the EU is doing, it is rather a huge advertisement that the EU should not become one.
Since the current situation is shit, and one EU national state will be shit, too, this only leaves one option. :-) So let's dissolve the EU before even more billions are wasted in this futile project.
It's better to be an EU MEP and do absolutely fuck all tbh.
I think that attempts at making the E.U. a state are doomed to fail. There are too many differences between countries, including customs, language, legal systems, etc. The United States of America works because all states largely inherited or adopted the British social contract. You can't replicate this in Europe. The E.U. should have never been more than a free trade agreement. The currency union was a big, fat mistake that amplified the Great Recession in many of the poorer E.U. states.
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.
No, not really. Unless you believe the Hollywood view that everything south of the US border has a Sepia filter
Intra-Canada commerce is a PITA in itself
Do you think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the central American countries? (Mexico being North America, yes I know)
> Do you think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the central American countries?
Did you mean How do I think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the Central American countries? If so I'd say it's nuanced and many people in those countries have their own views and their own various problems to solve, just like folks in France have a different view on immigration than, say, Switzerland, or how Germany and France can't agree on a fighter jet project and are looking at different industrial policies, or how Spain has a lot less interest in Ukraine than Latvia does.
Of course South America is incredibly culturally diverse, but I think it's a lot more homogenous than Europe is not just in terms of policy but culturally too. But hey if you disagree, sure make your case if you'd like. I'm just discussing the topic based on my own perceptions. The EU has something like 27 official languages and an Americas block would likely have 3 or so - that itself is the kind of thing that makes integration a lot easier.
In Europe a lot of people speak English as a second language but by and large many member states speak predominantly more languages - Spanish in Spain, Portuguese in Portugal, French in France, Italian in Italy (there's 4 different major language groups right there) and when you add in economy size, prominence on the global stage, geopolitical interests, history, and more it seems to me, in my opinion of course, it's a bit more difficult to wrangle, say, Germany and France together who have collectively killed millions of each others citizens versus, idk, Mexico and Colombia who are certainly distinct and have their own rich national and regional cultures (just like the United States even) but speak the same language and, in my view, get a long a little bit better.
I'm not arguing that there isn't a vibrancy in culture or that these countries are entirely homogenous. I'm arguing it would be easier to wrangle them together in a bloc of sorts than it was to get (and keep) the EU together.
For what it's worth a lot of cultural differences are becoming increasingly (unfortunately) minor differences at best because of globalization and the Internet and other communication technologies.
> and the destruction of thousands of spoken languages
Eh thousands of languages were destroyed by war and destitute and colonialization of various sorts throughout history. I'm not going to put a random assortment of them on a pedestal to get angry about just because they happened to be more recent (400 years ago). But anyway isn't China currently destroying spoken languages in places like Tibet and Xinjiang?
I think Europe and the Americas are differently heterogeneous and differently homogeneous. Certainly the Europeans have made more practical strides in building a coalition across their members than, say, South America or Central America. The reality is that Europe demonstrates a higher degree of solidarity between states than these other places. So it's strange to me to argue the opposite.
But if I understand, your assertion is that the Mayans, the islanders of the Caribbean, the people of Peru, or the Amazonians are less culturally different from one another than the citizens of, say, Greece and Norway? I'm not sure I buy it personally .. but I can see your argument.
not...really a solid argument for how well they would combine, but clearly a major contributor to how how much you know about them.
And FYI those languages didn't disappear 400 years ago. They are spoken today. Guatemala alone recognizes 25 current spoken languages - Spanish and 24 languages that are completely unrelated to any European language.
> For what it's worth a lot of cultural differences are becoming increasingly (unfortunately) minor differences at best because of globalization and the Internet and other communication technologies.
Good news! Many of these languages are still spoken today because these people still live in societies without the internet and other communication technologies! They don't even speak Spanish, their national official language, because they don't know anyone who speaks Spanish.
You don't have to know history, but try knowing a little bit more about current politics and geography before the sweeping statements?
An explanation for why some markets are smaller and fragmented is interesting academically but it doesn’t change that it’s not worth participating in.
Your country looks more like Germany (and if you know your history, that's no coincidence) than it looks like the EU.
> Overall proficiency: According to data from the European Union, over 43% of the total EU population speaks English as a second language, making it the most widely spoken non-native tongue across all 24 non-Anglophone countries in the bloc.
And Germany has 16 federal states.
The 10th amendment has been eviscerated by the courts. By a strict reading of its relatively simple language, most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional.
Today, USA is unabbreviated as the “United States of America”, but the country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.
As such, I am strongly in favor of returning to our former glory by stripping the federal government of most of its power and transferring it to the states.
I am also wise enough to know that will never happen without a long and bloody revolution, and I am okay with that given the lived reality that has defined my life.
We live in tyranny. You may not feel the rolling boil of the water that surrounds you, my fellow Americans, but make no mistake: your goose is cooked.
Can you please put a date on when you think this happened and what were the turning event(s)?
Because you could mean a lot of different points over decades. And what and when you think was the turning point is pretty significant.
Anytime there is a spat, the federal government dangles those highway dollars to get their way.
Do you have actual sources for that?
(Funny thing, I googled the phrase in quotes, did not realize the misspelling, and was a bit frustrated that the only result was this comment on HN...)
I'm not anti-federal government or anything but clearly we can see that there are issues in how the federal government has become so powerful and yet we're beholden to these two big-tent political parties leaving folks across the various states unhappy with decrees from Washington. Don't like Donald Trump's power over you? Maybe the federal government shouldn't have that power then?
Anybody seriously thinking that seems completely oblivious to how central EU is to the economies and every day lives of member states. There is a lot to criticise about EU but without it, the Europeans lives would be much worse and their economies would be nothing to speak of. It is very sad that populists managed to popularize the image of the bloated unnecessary monster. Even otherwise intellectually capable folks.
If it was just single registration for EU and paying for each kg of plastic or electronics to member states (like you do with VAT already via VAT-OSS) then it wouldn't be such a big deal.
Even if you didn't have any agreement with recycling companies in each member state and you had to pay the highest per-kg fees it would still be manageable for small sellers.
Meanwhile if you want to sell a single circuit board you're looking at several thousand euro in registration fees and several months for processing just to sell legally to 4-5 countries in EU.
nobody in an EU member state thinks of themselves as a "state" in the EU, they're a country but in the EU
nobody would want the US kind of federalism. not to mention there isn't a single majority language aside from English for those that know it well enough
The US / Trump doesn’t even manage to renegotiate a trade agreement with Canada, although you speak the same language and your cultural proximity is about 95% - so maybe it’s time to get off your high horse buddy
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.
Are they shipping within EU? Then they literally are in the field of shipping within the EU.
I also fail to see how this will stop Chinese companies from shipping to Europe. No Chinese company will register in this farce.
Also, are those bodies ready for the volume of applicants? They certainly weren't when MDR came in.
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.
hmm that is not systems thinking there.. there are more layers than that!
The biggest problem in Europe is the obsession with taxes. Tax on recycling, tax on AI, tax on this, tax on that. So people who want to make money and keep it without having to fight absurd amounts of regulation and red tape just go elsewhere.
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.
Have you evidence?
Only 6-8% of us political funding in 2024 came from business-PAC contributions.
https://www.fec.gov/resources/campaign-finance-statistics/20...
Further splits here: https://www.fec.gov/resources/campaign-finance-statistics/20...
There are exceptions to this of course but most politicians answer to voters much much much more than big business.
Why not do the obvious thing that can still help? There are some simple things we as a people or a conglomeration of peoples can do to curb the enthusiasm for state level corruption. It is doable. It will not solve everything - but surely we can still do it.
The conclusion does not necessarily follow the premises
To stop this, you need to try to stop both until one doesn't exists.
Not really
Lobbyists get to talk into the ears of the powerful. It is literally their job. They make very sensible arguments for their point of view. So it seems very sensible, for the legislators, to make laws that aid the powerful and impede the weak.
The legislators are very busy with pressures from all sides. The cognitive load of considering views that you do not hear is enormous. It is not "incompetent or corrupt" to fail.
The system has the corruption baked in. It is one of the mechanisms, of many, that wealth and power concentrate in "democracies "
I have seen this process from the inside, good people making terrible decisions
There are other right-wing (and left-wing) blocks who are funded by the Kremlin and Kremlin-supporters who just try to break things.
At the EC they're not corrupt, they try their best, but they're often given bad advice and are themselves not experts. And their power is limited (they can nudge but not push).
You need to be mad to think it's the right wing parties in the US who get the most funding. E.g. [0]
> The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...
If it was before than, then the EU recognized the problem and implemented a fix for it.
That is changing with the Single VAT Registration (SVR) legislation, effective in 2028.
Tomorrow Europe becomes a single market. How do I compete with a similar business but from a country where business costs are significantly lower ?
They seem to manage this just fine, but it's a pretty similar scenario. You could also push for standardized business costs and regulations eu wide ofc to help.
If you concentrated all manufacturing around just a few spots, you end up in a situation like India - inland states with resources get stripped of their resources while all the companies are based in coastal metropolises with port facilities.
One could also go the other way, like China, and let the states compete between themselves for manufacturing prowess, but you need a central planning committee to ensure that the competing provinces still coordinate and work to complement each other. Easier in China, not so much in the EU.
The EU single market is a sorry joke.
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.
Any entity that seeks to take risks to earn outsize income increases the income variance and makes it hard to organize your committed payouts. So you are forced (by your priorities) to discourage the entrepreneur and freelancer and encourage the 18-60 salaried employee. Fixed fungible production unit can be used as an input to a machine that produces committed output.
Then you import guest-workers etc. to improve throughput. You are forced by your priorities. Probably the expansion of the US welfare state will meet similar constraints soon enough.
It’s a bit just-so so I think there’s an over-claim in there but I think the seed is there.
Also you have Streamlined Sales Tax Registration System (SSTRS) for actual registration in US which covers 24 states.
This is by design. It’s the same all over the world. The wealthy are not going to just let you compete
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.
Where have you heard about that? Because there is no concept of universal business license.
https://rednetwork.net/articles/2026/06/how-corporations-set...
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/eu-leaders-puppets-of-financia...
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_are_the_reasons_behin...
https://edwardshepherd.substack.com/p/the-puppets-and-their-...
https://www.lobbycontrol.de/wp-content/uploads/EU-Lobbyrepor...
Now looking up for "EU politicians are prised for their probity and strong attachment to defend their people" here are the top results:
https://www.transparency.org/en/news/political-corruption-in...
https://www.ftm.eu/articles/european-parliamentarians-involv...
https://www.eupublicintegrity.com/what-is-public-integrity-i...
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-union-corruption-pf...
https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/04/29/europes-unpopula...
So even searching specifically for praising information, one will have to dig deep apparently, or maybe go straight to the official propaganda of what the politicians say about themselves (but probably less so about others).
Everyone is free to go as deep as they want (and can afford) and draw their own conclusions.
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.
(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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know the details well enough, but I do know that there is an effective anti-fedaralist force in the US wherever federal funding is concerned, as it comes with rules conditions (rules) attached. I would be interested to what extent this acts as a bias toward cooperation in the case of ez pass, given the interstate system.
California has a frustrating tendency invent its own systems that are neither better nor worse, but nonetheless incompatible with more widely accepted standards. The highway transponder example actually applies again - Fastrak.
CA has some great ideas too, don't get me wrong (ubiquitous painted curbs: great!) but a lot of the time it's just different for the sake of being different.
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...
This was traditionally something that the UK was better than the rest of Europe, having carve-outs for small businesses.
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-...
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.
Are these old ideas? The broad regulatory apparatus in the EU appears very modern and intentional.
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.
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.
Not a bad tradeoff, all included.
Either citizens have the power, exercise it continuously in practice and are supplied with everything it takes to assume that role properly with all the duties it implies, or there is no democracy beyond empty words.
Just saying lets vote directly on everything will put everything on hold until all goes down.
There's truth to this but it's an overstatement as it stands. For example, GDPR rules are less strict for small companies.
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.
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.
1. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-parliament-accused-overre...
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.
However, the bigger issue is that european parliament is treated in many countries as essentially dumping ground between national elections.
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.
"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.
https://www.statbureau.org/en/greece/inflation-charts-yearly
Can you quote where I did that, please?
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.
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.
I'm not saying it's not true, it's just that it's so hard to follow these things when one is supposed to have a life as well
https://packaging-journal.de/en/eu-commission-wants-to-scrap...
"According to the Händlerbund, the European Commission's proposal to abolish the requirement has been on the table since December 2025. However, discussions in the Council of the EU were suspended a few weeks ago after a majority of member states spoke out against it."
"A restricted version is currently being discussed in the European Parliament. According to this, an exemption is only to apply to micro-enterprises with up to 49 employees and an annual turnover of a maximum of 10 million euros. A first reading is scheduled for October 2026 at the earliest."
The crooked MEPs also voted in favor of this law. They are just as culpable.
Isn't that by far the simplest solution that removes any and all bureaucracy for almost everyone and still catches 99% of the cases?
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.
Chinese sellers don’t care, sure, but if you live in EU you do care.
Sure the financial penalties are in practice not common but they are still chilling. However, EU is also now starting marketplace level enforcement, so in practice even those Chinese sellers will not be able to sell anything without registration.
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.
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.
Unlike what you appear to believe Europeans are not some libertarian captured by the EU socialist, most europeans do want less wasteful and less harmful packaging.
Actually they'd have no retroactive way to enforce it at all, and the most they'd be able to do would be to charge an import duty on a per-parcel basis, which would ultimately be borne by the importer.
This would be a huge improvement over the utter nonsense they're implementing!
EU will be in mess forever because it is problem of power and greed.
So if you want to make a product, there should be readily available, easy to read and follow, guides to make your product compliant. For products with large sales volumes or higher risk, the procedures of course should be more thorough, allowing some more complexity. I think even free consults offered by governments could be a great idea, much better to have consultants before violating a law, than waste money with a lot of inspectors. Also stimulating people to solve problems (many times using technology) is another benefit.
They smash you very quickly. They do not care if they ruin you via prosecurion or you have to shut down. The tax agency is extremely agressive. The laws favor the agents to extents that are illegal and weven criminal (check the bonus of inspectors).
Check Robert Amsterdam work on this, something we all spanish know for a long time.
They see tourists and foreigners (even if they're from the EU) as a gigantic target to squeeze and screw as hard as they can. That's what you get when your economy is based on tourism and rich foreigners owning property there: you have to squeeze those hard for it's basically all you have. Officially tourism is "only" about 15% of the GDP but Spain is a service economy and so many of those services revolve around tourism and foreigner owning properties there. Same for the construction sector: they love it when rich tourists have fancy villas built there.
My wife used to own a house there. So did her mom. They sold it all and kissed Spain goodbye once and for all: too disgusted by how the fiscal authorities were treating them.
I won't go on vacation there anymore. Both my wife and my daughter speak spanish and yet we don't plan to go there anymore: she's done giving money to Spain to be seen, in return, as a lemon out of which more juice can be squeezed.
Vote with your feet and you wallet: when a country tries to fuck you, give it the middle finger.
In which way?
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.
>EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level
Then aren't the people who hold it simply correct? Why brand this valid view as "insidious populists?"
>The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they just implemented.
This is probably the best way to emphasize it. It is completely absurd, useless, non-functional, etc.
That's the commission telling small businesses that please don't stop selling in the EU and suggesting member states should use common sense. Unfortunately, as with all EU directives the implementation and enforcement is up to the member states, and especially certain northern countries really love their bureaucrats leaving common sense at home in the morning and sticking to the exact letter of the law. The 200000 EUR fine is Germany specific I think, obviously a prime candidate here.
- resentment that bad policy damages the institution’s reputation - annoyed it proves people i hate like correct
Of course this law it's complex for nothing, to me, they could have just added the cost of the recycling of the packaging material into the cost of the packaging material itself, making it that only the companies producing the packaging would need to comply (so that if you buy a box to ship something the cost of recycling of the box is already embedded in the cost of the box, like they did with plastic bags at the supermarket).
On the other hand I estimate that between 50% and 200% of the taxes collected like this are wasted and not applied to their ultimate goals. The average collected amount per submission is so small that you cannot pay the bureaucrats managing the complex submissions from these sums.
An entrepreneur told me that they were being audited regarding the battery regulation. Two consultants came over from EY and audited all submissions in depth. They found out that the business overpaid by €10. The entrepreneur of course didn't mind and told them to keep the €10. The EY consultants told the entrepreneur to resubmit, otherwise the business would be fined. I think the government spent more on that audit by EY than the business will ever bring in on fees.
On top of this we have the regulations like Intrastat and in the future near-real-time submission of digital invoices to our tax authorities.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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".
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.