Recent EU law changes start to be a bit crazy

🗣️ Off-Topic Lounge
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I don’t usually post about politics or regulations but I have to say… the pace of new EU rules lately is getting a bit crazy…

Every few months there seems to be another regulation, another reporting requirement, another compliance stuff.

I needed to do 3 major updates for WPBay in the recent 2-3 months, just to “comply”.

I’m all for protecting consumers and making the internet safer, but at this point it feels like the burden is falling almost entirely on small businesses and independent developers.

Large companies have legal departments and compliance teams which handle this for them, and if they need to spend another €100,000 on lawyers, it’s just another expense. For us who are building plugins, themes or digital products alone, every new regulation means days or weeks spent reading legal documents and implementing new changes…

The latest recent change is the new EU rule on “withdrawing from online contracts”… I had to implement automatic refund acceptance, if the customer is from EU zone and 14 days did not pass from the order and also if the zip/purchase code was not downloaded. So yeah…

Anyway, cheers!

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Some things are bad but it will be worth it, you’ll see :slight_smile:

Better like this than to live in USA when there are no regulations, the food there is mostly plastic!

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It’s a mixed bag. I agree the food regulations are mostly good.

Others are ridiculous: for example in Geneva you need a doctors note to be able to install air conditioning.

Overall I think the US is doing better: at least their people can vote and change direction, like how they voted Trump in.

In Europe, no one voted in Ursula or Kaja Kallas and no one can change them.

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I also see an issue with regulations, as they take them for an entire sector, without understanding the full implications of it. For example, they make a new rule set for online physical product stores and apply it also for digital product stores, without fully understanding the full implications.

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