The big rule-set resets typically squeeze the small guy
■"Biometric IDs could see massive growth: But debate rages about privacy, format and who gets the money," by Thomas Frank, USA Today, 15 August 2005, p. 1A.■"Sarbanes-Oxley Is a Curse for Small-Cap Companies," op-ed by Neal L. Wolkoff, Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2005, p. A13.
The "big boys" get served first in any rule-set reset, but the "little guy" tends to get lost in the shuffle.
Think about proposals for special fast-tracking of people through security-checking systems like air travel: if you're willing to lose some privacy, you go faster. But this is really a transaction that serves the "big guy," here the frequent flier like myself. Frequent Flier is probably better off, on average, than Sometime Flier. So what's in it for Sometime Flier? Not much: effort to get "golden ticket" probably not worth the loss in privacy.
Sometimes, a new rule set simply imposes undue financial burdens on the small guy. Sarbanes-Oxley set up all sorts of new accounting/reporting requirements by companies to avoid the sort of cheating that led to corporate scandals of recent years. But these requirements are expensive. Big companies are the real target, because it was big companies that were guilty of the most serious excesses. So fair enough for them to pay the high auditing costs. But what about the small companies? They are burdened to make effort that doesn't really get them much in return-so a real sunk cost that hampers their bottom line and efficiency.
Again, in both instances, we conduct rule-set resets designed to make us all safer, but how we set up the rules seems to penalize the little guy.
The answer would seem to be rule set regimes that allow all players to maintain security at costs commensurate with their size/demand/frequency.