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Agreed, this seems a likely explanation to me. I run a small hobby electronics business in my free time and although I ship some items to the EU I explicitly don't ship to Germany due to the additional complexity there; it's simply not worth my time for maybe 3 additional orders a year.

I'm sure the regulation is well-intentioned (and could even be great in aggregate effect too!), but a side-effect is that it biases the market in favor of larger companies who can afford to hire compliance specialists.




If you look at it from the German perspective, I think a person who is in/from Germany and has a small online hobby electronics shop would not be impacted by this the same way you are - thus, I believe the side effect you mention could be seen as biasing the market in favor of domestic small entities, as opposed to international ones, which might be good for a self sufficient economy. Feature not a bug, basically, is my suspicion. Although I suspect the intended target is more likely to be on Aliexpress than Tindie.




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