The regulatory tradition recently has been to target individual big tech companies rather than solve industry-wide issues. Laws forcing big tech to pay for local news, split storage, provide more and more granular consent forms, favor local businesses, etc have been written extremely narrowly tailored (e.g. 'this reg shall only apply to companies with over $XXB in revenue and XX thousands of employees in ad tech & streaming & e-comm industries...).
Paradoxically this has led to pretty much every government with an oversight role over tech unprepared for the rise of generative AI and competing social media apps from other countries. Will Canada try to make TikTok pay for media as well? What about OpenAI? While agencies got wrapped around the axel over individual actors, they missed the rise of the new era.
I welcome industry-wide guardrails, but to the point of this post the public sector needs far more internal ramping of capability to even understand what those should be. The race is now really whether the public sector agencies can modernize themselves fast enough to set proper guardrails before they either set them wildly too narrow, or not at all.
The regulatory tradition recently has been to target individual big tech companies rather than solve industry-wide issues. Laws forcing big tech to pay for local news, split storage, provide more and more granular consent forms, favor local businesses, etc have been written extremely narrowly tailored (e.g. 'this reg shall only apply to companies with over $XXB in revenue and XX thousands of employees in ad tech & streaming & e-comm industries...).
Paradoxically this has led to pretty much every government with an oversight role over tech unprepared for the rise of generative AI and competing social media apps from other countries. Will Canada try to make TikTok pay for media as well? What about OpenAI? While agencies got wrapped around the axel over individual actors, they missed the rise of the new era.
I welcome industry-wide guardrails, but to the point of this post the public sector needs far more internal ramping of capability to even understand what those should be. The race is now really whether the public sector agencies can modernize themselves fast enough to set proper guardrails before they either set them wildly too narrow, or not at all.