Again and again, lawmakers and federal agencies have chosen to protect competition between large firms, often at the expense of competition from small ones.

I wonder if you find that as peculiar as I do?

Isn’t it odd that giant Verizon is happier about competing for high speed Internet access customers against giant Time Warner Cable than it is about competing with little XO Communications?

There is language in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that allows companies to petition the FCC to refrain from applying standing regulations on them. There is also language designed to force the FCC to make decisions about those petitions in a reasonable amount of time. You wouldn’t think that would cause much problem but it [...]

In the House of Representatives, there is currently talk about another economic stimulus package and, in fact, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing last week to consider what such a package might look like from a small business perspective. Clearly, Congressional Democrats at least think more needs to be done to boost the [...]

We’re not going to pretend that we don’t have major party nominees for the 2008 presidential election, even if the party conventions that will make those nominees “official” haven’t happened yet. So, we’ll just say that presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have both put forth tax plans with which to woo voters. If [...]

It will be interesting to see whether Senate Democrats publish another of their “reports” outlining their accomplishments for small businesses during the second session of the 110th Congress. Perhaps there will be one or two provisions in the Disaster Loan program improvements legislation or the energy bill. But when it comes to the Small Business [...]

If you were under the mistaken impression that federal antitrust activity helped to safeguard the interests of small businesses against predatory larger competitors, a recently released study puts a tentative kibosh to that idea. The researchers examined several cases in the retail groceries industry and one case in the timber industry, and found that FTC [...]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a business alert to remind relevant firms that its Red Flag Rules will go into effect on November 1, 2008, and compliance is required as of that date. The relevant firms in question are financial institutions, which will not include any microbusinesses, and “creditors” — any firm that [...]

Most microbusiness owners are entirely willing to grant to the ambitious their perfect right to lust after fame, fortune and all the influence they can peddle.

It’s too bad the ambitious often can’t seem to grasp that not everyone shares their ambition. And, perhaps much more to the point, that there’s nothing wrong with that.

The human mind is a funny thing. We all carry around a mental model, a structure, of what the universe is. Our mental models explain everything, as completely as the models of everybody who came before us did for them. Throughout history, those mental models have changed as we have discovered new things or learned [...]

In a guest article reprinted by the MicroEnterprise Journal from the monthly Small Business Advocate newsletter, the Office of Advocacy’s John McDowell writes: “Changing markets, technology, and competition make it imperative that federal agencies periodically review how their current regulations affect small business. Only with regular evaluation can the enormous number of current regulations be [...]