Sigh. I feel like you didn’t quite understand the point I was making. I don’t think ridicule is in any way an appropriate response.
On a basic level this is not about regulation. It is, of course, in some way, but only a roundabout one. Regulation in EU countries already exists. National regulators have been regulating stuff here forever.
EU regulators very often do not wake up in the morning and think "What laws can I add today?”, they mostly think “How can I best unify those complex and already existing laws into one cohesive whole that makes some sense, taking into account the interests of all 27 member nations?”
Now, that’s a hard problem to solve, but it is very often not driven by any sort of desire to create more regulation. In fact, if you are a company operating EU-wide (or just a number of EU countries) the complexity of laws you have to adhere to may even go down with a unified EU law, even though the EU law may be more complex than any single law in any single EU member country.
It’s a messy process and it’s far from optimal, but I think it’s pretty much an EU wide consensus that the goal of the EU is not to abolish regulation in any kind of grande way. So unifying it is.
(It is, of course, also through that through now more and more unified laws the decision process on regulation now moved to the EU level. Where laws are already unified, decisions about future regulation are made on the EU level.)
Old Europe strikes me as a place that is great for oligarchs with political connections and lots of capital for regulatory compliance costs, but bad for low-capital scrappy startups. I guess that's why most people in Europe get a job working 40 hours a week for The Man where they can't be fired and take lots of vacation.
