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- Hacker News
- This is not new though. "We do not sell to EU end users."
https://pcengines.ch/recycle.htm
"... there are separate registration and recycling schemes for each of the 28+ EU member jurisdictions (and even a few of their provinces). What part of COMMON MARKET was so hard to understand for EU lawmakers ?
Since there is no single registration available, and separate registration would involve mindboggling complexity, bureaucracy and costs, we do not sell to EU end users until the EU gets their act together. Please order from EU based distributors, or as a business customer.
Business customers are expected to meet their obligations by registering in the EU countries they sell in. "
That was already ages ago when I did some sofware for them. 2007 ish if I'm to trust my Linkedin.
by nottorp - This is actively preventing me from sending packages to other countries as a maker. No matter how small the risk is, I don't want to risk a 5000 euro fine for sending a small amount of packages to other EU countries.by Robin_f
- Some people did the same when VATMOSS was introduced.by graemep
- Do you send them as your business or as yourself? If it's the latter, then I would consider forming a business to take on the risk. That's not free either, but think of it as insurance.by criddell
- No matter how small the risk is
That's just an excuse then. Register with whatever local authority in your country handles these things and in the unlikely event you get a grumpy letter just send them a copy of your registration documents.
by anigbrowl - Really sorry you’re experiencing this, that whole regulation rollout is a complete mess. The leadership should be sacked for such an incompetent regulation, it’s insane how much troubles they are creating for small businesses.
Another small business owner reported their experience in this Reddit thread, looks really bad: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1vrz88a/comment/p4i...
I’m as pro-EU as one can get but that’s a mistake we should solve asap
by dgellow - This echos the FCC rules in the US, which I believe are gotten around by not complying.
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.
- Adafruit sells boards as subassemblies, which don't need individual certification.
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.
- As a hardware guy it totally kills me, to get a fun or needed small time product off the ground and legally onto the market can require ~$250k of lab certifications.
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".
by WarmWash - FCC allows suppliers to self-declare conformance with EMI/EMC rules. You’re obviously taking a risk selling stuff if you haven’t had it properly tested so don’t really know if it passes but it’s unlikely to really be an issue for a small maker selling low quantities, especially if any intentional radiators (Bluetooth, WiFi etc.) are already-certified modules.
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)
by stephen_g - This is a great read and I can extend this argument really to any small business. Tax filing, VAT, bookkeeping, privacy, consumer, workplace and sectoral requirements frequently impose a disproportionately large cost on microbusinesses. EU is more and more split along the enterprise and VC backed line, and everyone in between has disproportionate costs. My barber in Stockholm often complains about this - the amount of money they would need to earn to overcome all these costs is staggering. So they often do lots of gigs on the side.by armcat
- Oh come on. Tax evasion by barbers is a classical example of why taxes are so high for the rest of us.
The cost of bookkeeping for a very small business is essentially zero. Everywhere that I know of exempts small business from double entry bookkeeping. VAT exemptions exist if revenue is low enough, too.
Privacy requirements are even easier: don't ask for, store, or process any personal information you don't absolutely need.
Your barber is being dramatic.
by elric - My barber in Italy just doesn't make me a receipt in exchange for a discount if I pay him cash so he doesn't have to pay taxes. Come on... the cost to operating a small business are usually low/there are tax exceptions, and they most of the time are even not payed at all.
Of course if you are a person that ships 20 packages you don't register a company to do so, nobody will, you just sell them privately (and the exception to sell things privately is quite high, in my country you can do it up to 5000 euros AT YEAR, after that you need to declare the income in your tax declaration but still you don't need to register a company if it's not your main income).
by alerighi - General view of EU politicians is that working class should be working for big corporations. Running own business is a sin.
The big corporations also don't want people to run small business, because they remove themselves from the job market and cannot be hired / exploited. So they lobby EU FOR regulations that ensure people cannot run business.
by varispeed - My first decision when building my company was to leave Spain.
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.
by germandiago - Where did you move to, if I can ask?by ken666
- Spain also smashes foreigners owning a property in Spain.
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.
- Another data point: Self-employed people in Greece are now taxed based on a "mandatory income" , which is meant to reduce tax evasion but also force small businesses to consolidate or shut down (guess which one happened). About 4000 people have objected this unfair taxation and requested being reaudited. 90% of them ended up being taxed even more, because tax laws are overly burdensome , complex and erratically applied. It's also not because of lack of oversight by tax authorities. In fact greece has the most complex digital oversight rules and digital bureaucracy , to the point that it is now ranked the world's worst country to do business: https://www.tmf-group.com/en/news-insights/articles/global-b...by seydor
- PPWR is not the only one. Don't forget WEEE and the battery regulation. Only for VAT we have a single entrypoint, for all other regulations, businesses have to submit for each country. Its simply impossible.
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.
by iamniels - > 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.
The point of this tax is not to raise revenue bit to disincentivize wate. Since the tax weight based, companies have an incentive to reduce packaging.
by realityking - PPWR is an EU catastrophe.
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.
by Jskewel - Really the chances that someone will ask a small company to be compliant are just very low. Of course if you sell something in an envelope nobody will ask you anything, the deal and the reason for this law (that I consider correct) is to address packaging waste from big companies.
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).
by alerighi - The legislation doesnt apply to small joes..... stop disseminating total hogwash, especially if you don't have any idea what you are talking about.by lofaszvanitt
- Gosh I hate it when politicians are useless and incompetent, since it just validates the false populist propaganda that politicians can be useless and incompetent, which is clearly not true (even in cases when politicians actually are useless and incompetent, which they of course cannot be, since that is evil propaganda).by carlosjobim
- > Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.
- resentment that bad policy damages the institution’s reputation - annoyed it proves people i hate like correct
by easytiger - > 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.
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.
by kilpikaarna - If this view is validated:
>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.
by nonethewiser - A couple of things to note:
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.
by mpweiher - The EU commission chooses what laws to propose for the parliament to vote, if it wasn't satisfactory they could have just withdrawn it.by Saline9515
- Good point.
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.