Tech regulation needs people who actually build things

Placeholder — outline below. A topic I care about; will expand into a full argument.

A recurring frustration: a lot of technology policy is written by people who have never had to ship the thing they’re regulating. That’s not a knock on expertise — it’s a knock on the distance between the rule-makers and the workbench.

Points I want to develop:

• Good regulation targets outcomes and behaviours, not specific implementations that are obsolete by the time the ink dries.
• The people who build systems understand the failure modes that matter — and they’re rarely in the room.
• “Move fast and break things” and “ban it to be safe” are both lazy. The interesting work is in the boring middle.
• Practical idea: more builders on advisory panels, more policymakers doing real implementation ride-alongs.

I’ll turn this into a proper essay — partly from the perspective of someone who’s spent years implementing the systems that policy talks about in the abstract.