MDRaisul / SFIO CRACHO / Adobe Stock / Sarah Soryal
Key Takeaways
- In this op-ed, Christian Keil explores the main strategies officials use when regulating new technologies and how they affect progress.
- He argues that even regulators who aim to support tomorrow’s innovation are massively overfitting to today’s technology.
- The solution, according to Keil, is for regulators to consider not just the “Current Thing” but also the “Next Thing.”
This might surprise some in the tech community, but regulators are people, too.
Regulators are accused daily of both incompetence and malice, painted as one homogenous block of stalwarts who wake up and choose to stifle innovation and entrench incumbents. But in my job at Astranis, a company building dedicated satellite networks, I’ve talked to dozens of regulators around the world — from the United States to the United Nations, across the Americas, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond — and I can say from experience that regulators are not a monolith.
The regulators I work with differ widely in their level of technical knowledge, approach to incumbents, degree of belief in isolationism, and openness to change. Some would prefer that nothing change, ever, but such stalwarts are increasingly being replaced by tech-forward successors who want to promote economic growth and enable innovative new companies to gain market share.
In this article, we’ll explore the main strategies regulators use and discuss the emergence of a new and troubling pattern: even regulators who aim to support tomorrow’s innovation are massively overfitting to today’s technology.
Strategy #1: Stop growth entirely
The easiest — but worst — way to regulate a new industry is to kill it completely.
This is the strategy famously adopted by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In the 25 years before 1979’s partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, it granted roughly 180 construction permits for new reactors. In the 25 years after the accident, it granted zero.
New technology is scary, and as it advances, it can prove increasingly difficult to regulate. For regulators, abstinence is simpler than moderation.
Credit: EIA
Strategy #2: Protect the incumbents
Another strategy for regulating an industry is to try to lock it in amber, preserving the status quo with regulations designed to protect and preserve the advantages of its incumbents. New entrants are disruptive and scary. Incumbents are consistent.
There are many ways to operationalize this strategy.
The simplest is to add ever-increasing layers of bureaucratic overhead to every aspect of the industry. In practice, this manifests as steadily adding new rules without removing old ones. We can call this the “TSA strategy of managing risk.” A group of terrorists plots (and fails) to sneak liquid explosives on a plane in 2006, and for the next 20 years, no one is allowed to bring water bottles with them through security.
Incumbents can withstand immense regulatory overhead because they have the means to hire people to manage it. In some cases, they’ll even hire former regulators — the very people who designed the regulations — to manage their compliance efforts. This is just another marginal cost of doing business to them.
For startups, though, raising prices is often the only way to deal with the cost of compliance efforts, and this makes them less competitive. In some cases, they might decide to opt out of the market entirely — this decision could be based on a cost/benefit analysis, investor trepidation, or some combination of fear and logic.
Regulators worldwide are incredibly adept at implementing this strategy.
Americans spent 10.5 billion hours filling out regulatory compliance paperwork in 2023.Getting a man to the moon only took 7 billion hours of work. pic.twitter.com/9NcfVACsGj
— Christian Keil (@pronounced_kyle) October 4, 2025
Another way to protect the status quo is to make a rule that forever ensures incumbent supremacy. Though it seems these rules should be deemed anticompetitive — and therefore illegal — they are extremely common.
For example, many national satellite telecommunications regulators have a rule stating that all new entrants must complete “coordination” efforts to deconflict their intended use of spectrum before they can be granted a new license. On the surface, this seems benign and even necessary. But it runs the risk of looking like regulatory capture. A malicious incumbent could easily make such coordination efforts drag on until the startup either runs out of resources or gives up on entering the market.
This strategy does not lead to growth and innovation. As physicist Max Planck famously pointed out, science advances one funeral at a time — incumbents must “die” to make room for the new. The same is true of industries. They advance every time a company falls out of the Fortune 50.
Many regulators are aware of this, which is why they are increasingly turning to a third regulatory strategy — one that sounds appealing, but is unfortunately and perniciously misguided.
Strategy #3: Enable the Current Thing
The recent surge to make regulation more future-friendly is genuinely exciting. In my own industry — aerospace — regulators in Australia, Germany, Singapore, and many other nations have been moving in this direction for years. The second Trump administration is now leading the future-friendly charge in the U.S.
As someone who has been closely watching this wave build, though, I believe that today’s pro-technology, pro-business, and pro-future regulations are being implemented in ways that are, unfortunately, naïve and potentially even harmful.
Let me explain.
The most obvious way to build future-friendly regulation is to get extremely hyped about today’s cool new technology, a.k.a. the “Current Thing.” Today’s Current Things include humanoid robots, small modular reactors (SMRs), first-person-view (FPV) drones, low-Earth orbit satellites, and anything that the Department of War might buy for a fight against China.
It is fashionable to believe that these Current Things represent the future, so no regulator is going to draw flak from the tech community for being in favor of them.
To be clear, loving SMRs and building new rules to help them is far better than Strategy #1 (killing all nuclear reactor technology) or Strategy #2 (expecting SMR developers to navigate regulations established for legacy reactors). But what happens if, in five years, SMRs are no longer the Current Thing? What if still smaller reactors, ones that power a single home, show promise? Or someone invents handheld nuclear batteries? Or truly massive reactors find new technological enablers?
Enabling the Current Thing is a good idea, but not if it comes at the expense of the Next Thing. If regulators design rules too narrowly around today’s technology — the Current Thing — they might unwittingly be stifling progress and perhaps even regulating the Next Thing out of existence.
This is, unfortunately, not a hypothetical risk. In July of this year, the San Francisco Land Use & Transportation Committee passed an ordinance that would make it illegal for any major renovation of a building to include a gas stove. This is the language that the Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman used in the announcement of this ordinance:
We can’t build the San Francisco of the future with fuel from the past. This legislation picks up where we left off with the All-Electric New Construction ordinance and affords us the opportunity to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in our existing buildings, improve indoor and outdoor air quality, and make San Francisco a safer, healthier, and more resilient place to live and work. Choosing clean energy is how we build the clean, all-electric City of the future.
Classic Strategy #3 rhetoric.
I love clean energy. I also love electric stoves. But I think that making major renovations more difficult will lead to fewer major renovations, which will mean it takes us even longer to move on from homes with lead paint, asbestos, weak foundations, and, yes, gas stoves.
Interlude: Rural broadband funding’s path through all three strategies
The U.S. government has long considered extending reliable, high-speed broadband service to the entire nation a major priority. But when we look at how it has approached this goal from a regulatory standpoint, we can see the previously mentioned strategies at play — and see how they are preventing it from meeting its goal.
In 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), dedicating $20.4 billion toward efforts to connect the unconnected.
In December 2020, it asked companies to bid on money from the fund — they’d say they could connect X locations in exchange for X dollars, and the FCC would decide whether to give them money. SpaceX Starlink was one of the winning bidders, initially awarded $885.5 million to deliver 100/20 Mbps speed or faster broadband to 642,925 locations across 35 states.
At the time of the bidding, Starlink was still a fledgling communications network, with fewer than 900 satellites in its constellation. Upon review, the FCC determined that Starlink had not demonstrated its ability to meet RDOF performance and affordability requirements, and in 2022, it rescinded the award.
A scary new entrant emerged, so the incumbents were given $42 billion to help them maintain their dominance.
Fast forward to 2023, and the U.S. was ready to take another crack at closing the digital divide with the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, which gave all 56 states and territories part of a $42 billion pot to use to build internet infrastructure.
The program got off to a slow start. Through its first two years, BEAD connected exactly zero people, causing opponents to decry it as a Strategy #1 attempt to kill rural broadband rollout. But the years from 2021-2023 were not without significant activity in the rural broadband market.
By August 2023, SpaceX had launched nearly 5,000 Starlink satellites, and its service was available across the U.S. and the rest of the world. Given that development, you might expect BEAD’s rules to be more favorable than the RDOF’s with respect to the newly proven technology — but quite the opposite proved true. According to the rules of the BEAD program, Starlink’s satellite internet service did not qualify as “reliable”:
(u) Reliable Broadband Service—The term “Reliable Broadband Service” means broadband service that the Broadband DATA Maps show is accessible to a location via:10 (i) fiber-optic technology;11 (ii) Cable Modem/ Hybrid fiber-coaxial technology; 12 (iii) digital subscriber line (DSL) technology;13 or (iv) terrestrial fixed wireless technology utilizing entirely licensed spectrum or using a hybrid of licensed and unlicensed spectrum.
So, after years of lobbying from incumbents, the U.S. government decided that what the country needed was more restrictions on deploying funding to connect the unconnected. This is explicit Strategy #2 behavior: incumbent protection. A scary new entrant emerged — next-gen satellite internet — so the incumbent terrestrial telco operators were given $42 billion to help them maintain their dominance.
It wasn’t until the second Trump Administration that the U.S. shifted from Strategy #2 to Strategy #3. In a June 2025 Policy Notice, it announced that it was removing all explicit technology restrictions on BEAD funding:
To guarantee that American taxpayers obtain the greatest return on their broadband investment – the Benefit of the Bargain – NTIA finds that the full force of the competitive marketplace must be utilized. Therefore, all broadband technologies that meet the performance requirements of IIJA and the NOFO must be eligible to participate in the BEAD Program. Accordingly, NTIA rejects the Biden Administration’s imposition of technology preferences on Eligible Entities and instead adopts a technology neutral approach for the BEAD subgrantee selection process.
Once Starlink and other low-Earth orbit satellite providers were eligible, they quickly began securing BEAD funding. Starlink alone has secured a reported $538 million worth of awards across 40 states to connect some 350,000 people. This is an extremely positive step.
But this Policy Notice still fell short of the ideal. Rather than letting consumers decide which broadband services are high-performance enough, the Policy Notice retained the original requirements of the plan: that services must provide 100/20 Mbps plans and ≤100 ms latency to be eligible. These standards still effectively excluded geostationary satellite systems — which operate roughly 22,000 miles above Earth — since the physical limits of light-speed delay make such low latency impossible.
This means that the Policy Notice still limits the technologies that the program can help deliver to consumers.
Luckily, there may be a happy ending to this story. Buried in the BEAD funding documents is a truly future-friendly pathway for funding: “non-deployment funds.” Simply, if a state achieves its goals after deploying the money it asked for in the BEAD program, any excess money becomes “non-deployment funds” that the state can use to continue advancing the program’s goals however it sees fit. It is not clear whether the NTIA (the administrating agency for BEAD) will actually allow those non-deployment funds to be spent — the rules were clear that they would, but then NTIA issued new guidance that suggested the opposite. The industry is currently waiting in limbo to hear what happens.
I am a fan of non-deployment funding because it’s a perfect example of Strategy #4: regulators let 1,000 flowers bloom and trust people to decide for themselves what products and services they want to buy.
Strategy #4: Tech-neutral, future-friendly regulation
We cannot predict future technologies. As Alasdair MacIntyre, my favorite modern philosopher, imagined in his magnum opus, After Virtue:
Some time in the Old Stone Age you and I are discussing the future and I predict that within the next ten years, someone will invent the wheel. “Wheel?” you ask. “What is that?” I then describe the wheel to you, finding words, doubtless with difficulty, for the very first time to say what a rim, spokes, a hub, and perhaps an axle will be. Then I pause, aghast. “But no one can be going to invent the wheel, for I have just invented it.” In other words, the invention of the wheel cannot be predicted. For a necessary part of predicting an invention is to say what a wheel is; and to say what a wheel is just is to invent it.
In short, predicting the future is inventing the future, and regulators are not inventors. But that doesn’t mean their jobs are impossible: We can optimize our rules for an uncertain future by planning to be surprised, and regulators have shown in the past that they can leave room for future development.
Imagine if the people regulating computer hardware in the 1990s had, inspired by fears of youth video game addiction, decided to create rules that halted the development of GPUs the same way NRC rules did nuclear reactors or that only allowed incumbents to develop them. This could have delayed advancements that ultimately allowed us to use GPUs for artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency mining, and so much more.
I predict that few people who read this article will argue in favor of Strategy #1 (“Allow nothing”) or even Strategy #2 (“Protect incumbents”). But plenty might think that regulators should pursue Strategy #3 (“Enable the Current Thing”).
This would be a mistake. Imagine if the people regulating nuclear power today decide to follow this strategy, creating rules that help advance just the latest nuclear fission technologies — they could stifle the development and deployment of nuclear fusion, potentially preventing us from obtaining a technology that could provide near-limitless clean energy and drive humanity forward.
I support regulators who focus on the future and who care about growth, about business, and about startups. But I believe it would be incredibly shortsighted for them to only consider technologies of which they are personally aware when thinking about tech neutrality. I also believe that even regulators who do a great job at promoting the technologies of today run a serious risk of stymieing — even if inadvertently — the technologies of the future.
If we are truly committed to modernizing our regulatory regimes and optimizing for the future, we need to do it the right way, considering not just the Current Thing but also the Next Thing — even if there’s no way to actually know what it’ll be.
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