Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Aurornis | on: PPWR lands another blow to an precarious tabletop industry
> but no indication of what that means.

That’s the point. There are 27 member states that each have their own regulations that need to be complied with.

The article has more details than your comment implies, such as the fact that some states like Spain have ongoing recurring fees too.

Dealing with changing regulations and fees that are different across 27 states on top of all of the other EU regulations is normal for a big company with a lot of staff and lawyers, but if you’re a small company trying to ship any product you have to start maintaining a list of individual states where you think you can break even and decide if it’s worth doing all of the work to try to sell there.

If you’ve never had to deal with regulatory compliance or shipped physical products this all probably does sound like whining to you, but that’s only because you don’t know how hard it is to comply with regulations for 1 EU state, let alone 27 of them multiplied by all relevant regulations.

em-bee | parent | next
the article really doesn't have enough details. the different regulations per country are the least of the problem. the real whammy is having to have a representative in each country, which will cost money every year in every country, not just in some. see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49485957
dandellion | parent
But how is it different? Because I live in one of those 27 member states, and I'm pretty sure that we had our own regulations before, that they were different from the other 26 states, and that any companies doing business here had to comply with them. Or is it that they were not complying with regulations before and now they will have to?
veeti | root | parent
Before: you make a thing, you stick it in box and mail it to someone in another EU country. Fees paid: postage.

After: for every one of the 27 EU countries you plan to ship to, you must pay hundreds or thousands of euros in registration fees as a packaging producer.

Somehow, regulation believers who think they are sticking it to the big man think this is a reasonable system, and not a complete killer of small time entrepreneurship for those not fortunate enough to have millions in capital.