Tech doesn't need regulation - it needs a conscience

There are better ways to control an industry that government intervention

President Trump caused a(nother) stir this week when he took the bold step of threatening Google, accusing the search giant of being part of a conspiracy to suppress positive news about his leadership.

Although tempting, we should not brush this off as Trump being his normal thin-skinned self: it highlights a trend that has been on the rise for years.

Governments increasingly want to have a say over how technology companies operate. It might come through as a desire to protect their citizens, or to address unfair business practices - but however you dress it up, it is the public sector intruding on the private.

Regulation is a dirty word in Silicon Valley, the land of the professional bro: a place where skyrocketing house prices are literally driving people from their homes (to the disgust of those responsible) and there have been serious calls to secede from the United States.

It's easy to see why regulation is treated with suspicion. The internet as we know it was created in the libertarian boom of the 1990s, when the promise of freedom from oversight heralded the uninhibited innovation the likes of which the world had never seen before. That belief still holds true across Silicon Valley today.

It was in the middle of this period that John Perry Barlow published his famously smug ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace', which begins:

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Really, wouldn't you want to regulate the heck out of anyone who said that to you?

Nobody (outside Silicon Valley) thinks that tech companies should be left completely unregulated, of course. They already face some: commercial drones are banned from flying in certain areas; the GDPR stipulates how companies can use personal data; and Uber still risks being run off of London roads.

Uber's problems are a perfect example of the problem that lawmakers face with regulation. On the one hand, the service isn't regulated like London's black cabs, and neither are its drivers satisfyingly vetted. On the other, the app is a convenient and often cheaper alternative to hailing a cab, and incredibly popular: it has almost 3.5 million users in the capital.

So, what's to be done? Stick with the law, or bow to progress? Both will alienate someone. What the industry really needs are new rules for this new age, where regulation doesn't mean protectionism.

Government intervention can be a force for good. It can force companies to behave responsibly, as we're seeing at the tail end of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal; but it can also stand in the way of innovation and prevent the free market economy from operating (see Uber, above).

Traditional regulations were designed in response to an earlier age, to control technologies that could be touched then and there: they cannot satisfyingly cover speculative inventions like artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. Should we regulate AI now because, at some point in the future, it could put people out of work?

There is no way to calculate the risk of artificially limiting innovation. Trying to regulate tomorrow's technology based on today's understanding of it is pointless at best, and harmful at worst. Often, as author and internet analyst Larry Downes writes, the best regulator of technology is simply more technology.

It probably comes as no surprise that I am a proponent of the free market. If an industry or a company is being replaced by one that is inherently better (Kodak and digital photography comes to mind), does it deserve to be saved?

However, neither am I a full-blown libertarian. I can recognise the desire to protect jobs and citizens, and acknowledge that regulation plays an important role in an economy - and that, along with a genius-level intellect and pots of cash, is what separates me from Silicon Valley's tech bros.

The mostly-young, mostly-white, mostly-men who form the majority of Silicon Valley's employees and entrepreneurs are, without a doubt, very clever. They have built some of the world's most successful firms, and help millions of people to connect with each other using their services.

What many of them seem unable to do is connect with the people using those services: those outside the fail-fast, innovation-over-everything bubble. Their customers, in other words.

That's how we end up with people like Mark Zuckerberg, experimenting with peoples' emotions without their consent; people like Justin Keller, who penned a letter praising San Francisco's efforts to sweep homeless people off the street before the Super Bowl; people like Jethro Batts and David Boulton, who took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 to introduce the ‘Titstare' app; and people like Richard White, who was so annoyed at train drivers in one of America's richest cities striking over low pay that he infamously tweeted, "Pay whatever the hell they want, get them back to work, and then go figure out how to automate all their jobs."

Instead of regulation, perhaps what technology really needs is a big dose of empathy.