Ask HN: Ideas either implemented or proposed historically to level playing field
Let&#x27;s see if I understand:<p>* Companies are put into revenue tiers.<p>* The price for any good&#x2F;service paid by a company is increased by some TBD formula.<p>* Roughly speaking, the formula chosen would mean that companies in higher revenue tiers pay more.<p>* Then survey companies&#x2F;consumers that interact with a company to determine if that company is following the rules.<p>* Plus a rule to forbid playing shell games with companies you own.<p>If that&#x27;s all in the ballpark of what you where trying to communicate, here are my immediate thoughts:<p>* Based on the &quot;into the economy&quot; instead of taxes angle, I&#x27;m assuming the intent is for the premium paid still goes to the company selling the good&#x2F;service. I suspect this could end up incentivizing a pricing structure like the one we see in US medicine where insurance companies negotiate that they&#x27;ll pay some discounted amount to the hospital, but the hospital just raises the line item cost a commensurate amount so they end up being paid what they originally wanted to. Only it&#x27;d be large companies will purchase from companies who agree to negotiate a price that after adding the legally mandated premium, ends up being what they wanted to pay anyway. Of course the selling company will be fine with this because it means business from a large company.<p>* Using surveys to determine compliance creates a perverse incentives to poison the surveys of your competitors. Even without such laws we already see that happen with Amazon reviews. Companies pay to have negative reviews placed on their competitors products.<p>* I&#x27;ll suggest a possible negative conservative viewpoint: Manipulating an independent company&#x27;s pricing by legal mandate in some new way is regulatory overreach.<p>* If disallowing self-ownership of multiple companies based on some rules were enough to stop collusion, we&#x27;d have solved it years ago. If I can&#x27;t own it myself, I&#x27;ll pay someone to own it, and have them follow my orders. This is well within the borders of what the SEC already deals with, only they deal with way more complicated versions of it. For example, the loophole du jour is SPACs. SEC says that both companies involved in a merger must meet certain requirements. Those requirements can be inconvenient for an existing company to meet (audits take time and money), so instead create a brand new company, which you control in practice, that&#x27;s squeaky clean from the SEC&#x27;s standpoint and have THAT company make the actual purchase. That&#x27;s a Special Purpose Acquisition Company.<p>The takeaway I think is that ultimately, trying to regulate financial behavior directly is a losing game full of unintended consequences. It&#x27;s all about (dis)incentives.<p>Subsidies incentivize. Taxes disincentivize. Everything will be gamed to the nth degree.