In defence of floors
“Regulation kills innovation”. You’ve heard this one before, and you’ll keep hearing it. It is, to use a highly technical term, poppycock. It gets recycled endlessly by every “visionary” who needs you to believe that the rules protecting you are actually hurting you.
What they usually mean is: I am currently making money by doing something you’d stop me from doing if you understood it. Please do not look too closely.
Let’s do some history. In the 80s, mobile telecoms in Europe was a mess of proprietary analog standards, each one controlled by its own little fiefdom/national monopoly. The handset you bought in Germany was a brick in France, roaming was not a thing.
CEPT (European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations) pushed for GSM, an open interoperable standard available to all. Industry players did what industry players do: they said it would lock in the wrong technology, destroy competition, slow innovation, and all the rest of it.
What actually happened was the European mobile market: competitive handset manufacturers, SIM cards, roaming, etc. GSM became the backbone of worldwide mobile standards. It turns out that when operators couldn’t build a moat based on proprietary technology, they had to compete on making better products.
That’s the real game: not innovation versus stagnation, but competition on merit rather than lock-in.
Another example is the EU common charger mandate. The objections were ritual and identical: innovation would be stifled, manufacturers would stop creating new products, and all that jazz. What we got instead was a massive interoperable market for charging infrastructure and cables you own once and can use pretty much forever. The “innovation” they were defending was being able to sell you a new charger or cable every time you got a new device.
Regulation sets a floor. It defines what you’re not allowed to do to your users. Below it: prohibited, above it: competition.
When you can’t trap users behind proprietary walls, you have to make something they actually want.
The people screaming the loudest about regulatory burdens on innovation are, nearly without exception, the people with a business model that needs freedom to do harm.
When you hear their complaints, ask yourself: what, specifically, do they need the freedom to keep doing to you?
Colin