Comment by nonrandomstring
7 months ago
Good ones. Nice to shake up this thinking. We need more courageous legal exceptionalism to redistribute power and deal with complexity.
I've just finished recording a Cybershow episode with two experts in compliance (ISO42001 coming on the AI regulatory side - to be broadcast in January).
The conversation turned to what carrots can be used instead of sticks? Problem being that large corps simply incorporate huge fines as the cost of doing business (that probably is relevant to this thread)
So to legally innovate, instead, give assistance (legal aid, expert advisor) to smaller firms struggling with compliance. After all governments want companies to comply. It's not a punitive game.
Big companies pay their own way.
The trouble is that governments might not have a bias towards any company, but the government employees doing everything do. If the government is handing out a lot of assistance then you get a layer of middlemen who will help companies "get things done". The issue with this is that they are an additional burden that suck out resources from the system.
I think on balance there's a net gain in value. Enabling new companies to navigate burdensome regulation contributes to the economy in the long run. If money is a problem big companies who made the regulation necessary with their ill behaviour can subsidise the entry of competitors. I think people are starting to call that "coopertition" as a idea somewhere between taxation and corporate social responsibility.
One of the major things governments should be doing and largely aren't is publishing open source software (e.g. BSD license) for regulatory compliance. Not just a tax filing website, the actual rules engine that some government lawyers have certified as producing legally-compliant filings.
The point being to allow members of the public to submit a pull request and have their contributions incorporated into the officially-certified codebase if it's accepted, so the code ends up being actually good because the users (i.e. the public) are given the opportunity to fix what irks them.