Tech regulation gets the least reader engagement of any topic Benedict Evans covers, despite his audience being overwhelmingly technical professionals. Over a thousand of his newsletter subscribers use Google email addresses. His argument: most regulation simply does not touch most people in tech, and he makes the structural case for why that is not ignorance but rational indifference.
Evans maps the mismatch precisely. Content moderation and privacy rules target social networks and ad-funded platforms. Most Silicon Valley startups are neither. GDPR and HIPAA are compliance costs, not existential threats, for enterprise SaaS or DevOps tools. Apple's App Store policies matter to some consumer businesses, not to Databricks or Okta. Even inside Google or Meta, the EU's Digital Markets Act is someone else's problem unless you work on the specific product line it names. The breakup talk, spinning off Instagram or YouTube, Evans argues elsewhere would barely shift the competitive landscape and remains years away in the United States.
The piece earns a full read for its closing pivot. Evans draws the steel-and-gasoline analogy: safety and emissions standards reshaped car rules but Detroit kept building combustion engines in Detroit, until it did not. The regulation debate is the wrong frame. AI, quantum computing, LEO satellites, the chip industry's reconfiguration, and the unbundling of Excel and Salesforce into new productivity software: these are the changes that will actually alter what technical workers do every day. That is where the engagement is, and Evans is direct about why.
[READ ORIGINAL →]