We're missing the application layer for tech policy
Benedict Evans recently argued that most people in tech don’t seem to care about regulation because it ‘really doesn’t affect what people are working on’. This is true, but only for a very narrow definition of ‘tech’. Lots of other applied regulation affects tech people, it’s just not explicitly about tech. We need to fix it, not erase it.
The internet shifted us from a world where tech was a discrete sector to an entirely new paradigm where software redefined business models, service design and org models across the entire economy.
This new world has thrown up both ‘tech questions’ and ‘non-tech questions’, about companies both big and small. For years, lots of effort has gone into tech questions about small companies, tech questions about big tech companies, and non-tech questions about big tech companies. But that still leaves an entire category missing: regulatory issues that aren't explicitly about tech, but which have renewed relevance & need refreshing precisely because of new technologies and business models. Call it the ‘application layer of tech policy’:
Benedict, like many commentators and policymakers, is mostly focused on ‘pure tech’ issues or ‘big tech’ issues with massive reach and impact. So he writes about AI policy, competition, online safety or data privacy and what this all means for industrial and geopolitical competition. Occasionally, when big tech companies expand into ‘sensitive’ domains like finance and healthcare, media and policy attention follows — albeit often critically rather than optimistically. But mostly, these issues either don’t affect most people in tech or they’re just a cost of doing business they don’t really think about.
Startup policies are different. There is a huge amount of policy effort that affects hundreds of thousands of people in tech. We already know that founders and investors alike care deeply about capital availability, exit regimes, R&D tax credits, visas, spinouts and listings reform. There’s still headroom for improvement, but the foundations are there.
But there’s another category too. The next frontier of tech policy can’t just be ‘horizontal’, ecosystem-wide policies where all the low hanging fruit have now been picked. Instead we need policymakers (and commentators) to direct more energy and attention towards ‘vertical’, sector-specific efforts to help the next frontier of tech to scale: that means upgrading regulators, fixing procurement, opening up data, and quickly enabling step-change technologies in markets with slow-moving, legacy incumbents.
For decades, one barrier to progress has been the lack of an institution combining a) deep, sector-specific insight, b) cross-sectoral, early-stage perspective, and c) skin in the game required to see changes through over a long period. But we’re here now 😉
It is telling that there is no reference whatsoever to social or environmental impact - to use two broad terms. Which perhaps illustrates why tough regulation is required because the finance and tech people driving development really do not consider such issues, but are only concerned with a narrow shareholder focus - revenue and profit. They cannot be trusted to consider wider impacts, consistent with behaviour in recent decades. Especially dangerous where AI is concerned.