system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does GoDaddy Support the SOPA if it just means the domains they have registered will be taken down (The exact thing we are doing on our own)?

Or do I not understand this correctly? Please enlighten me.
gpt
A lot of people think that big business doesn't like government making rules for their business ("regulation"). But weirdly enough, big business people *write* a lot of the rules that government passes. And big business spends a lot of money supporting lawmakers who pass those rules.

What's up there? If they don't like rules why do they write them and support them?

The problem with having a lot of complicated rules is that it's hard to make sure you are following them all. It's expensive. You have to hire lawyers and compliance experts and other people to tell you how to follow the rules.

Imagine if football or baseball got hundreds of new rules every year, and all the teams had to hire lots of extra coaches to teach the players how to play by all the new rules. Well, the *very rich* teams wouldn't have a big problem with that. They can afford to hire all those extra coaches. But the *not-so-rich* teams would have a big problem, because they can't afford the extra coaches. They would spend so much on trying to figure out the new rules that they wouldn't have any time to practice throwing the ball. And *new* teams, who were just learning the game, would have more and more to learn before they could compete.

And who are the very rich teams competing against? The not-so-rich teams and new teams.

Big business doesn't compete against government. It competes against small and medium business; and new businesses (startups) — which always start small. Regulation increases the cost of business, but big businesses can afford that better than small ones. And big businesses have the influence with government that lets them help write the rules so they aren't as much affected by them as their competition.