One industry's red tape and another industry's system
The Australian (30 January 2013, p. 3) reported Tim Berners-Lee's recent visit to Australia under the headline "Inventor against net regulation". The article itself specifies that Berners-Lee, among many others things, had actually spoken against regulation by the United Nations in particular, and doesn't specify whether he had any thoughts on who, if anyone, should regulate it.
Anti-regulation pronouncements like that implied by the article's title never fail to have me rolling my eyes at the naïveté of commentators whose primary criterion for regulation appears to be that it should be short. Of course no one would dispute that regulation ought to be constructed in as concise and straightforward a manner as possible in order to achieve its goal. But contemptuous references to "red tape" and the like frequently seem to me to conceal a lack of appreciation for the goal of regulation as well as the speaker's arrogance about his or her own perspective relative to that of others.
I suspect that phrasing regulatory arguments in terms of choosing whether to regulate or not is missing the point. Regulators must choose which interests to protect, and to what degree. In the context of the data-collection matters to which Berners-Lee apparently referred, for example, regulators must determine the degree which to protect the interests of private citizens by restraining the behaviour of data-collecting entities like Internet companies and government departments, and the degree to which protect the interests of data collectors by allowing them to collect and use data as they please. To say that there is some celestial state of nature with which regulators should not interfere is at best incoherent, and at worst lazy capitulation to the interests of the most powerful.
Of course technology companies would prefer that regulators favour their interests, as The Register lampoons in a recent article on Google's opinion of government data collection. Technology enthusiasts, for whom the computer industry is of unique importance, happily tag along with demands that Internet service providers be free from regulation (such as the recent SOPA legislation in the US) that might protect the interests of other industries or of governments — except, of course, when the same service providers want to do something that would impinge on the enthusiasts' own interests, such as harvest their personal data or cap the amount that they can download for their monthly service fee.
I don't envy the job of regulators. I don't imagine they receive many thank-you letters from regulatees, expressing gratitude for the legislation to which the regulatees are subject. Perhaps a regulator in the mould of Dilbert's Wally would welcome the demand to do as little as possible, but who'd want Wally on their staff?
