Welcome to 2018 [LWN.net]

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 5, 2018 20:11 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
In reply to: Welcome to 2018 by JanC_
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

Government taxes and regulations are a major driver of company size increase.

Is your company paying for road transport, including taxes? Buy your own trucks. Is your company of five people having trouble following ALL of the current HR regulations for hiring and firing employees? Get big enough or get acquired. Now you have an HR and legal team that fills an entire building so you're on top of every legality. Are you providing Internet to end-users but your upstream transit costs are killing you? Buy the upstream and become Tier 1. Now YOU can charge transit fees to reach your end-users.

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Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 6, 2018 21:00 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link]

In most countries HR regulations are much less strict for small companies (to the point where some companies are split up in many small divisions to avoid them).

The trend also seems to be that companies sell all their trucks/vans and hire self-employed truck/van owners instead. (It's much easier to exploit individual owner-drivers than it is to exploit hundreds of employees, I guess.)

And I do understand some of the economic reasons why companies want to become bigger & bigger (although in many cases it's also based on a cult-like belief), but that doesn't mean a small number of big companies is better for consumers or for society.