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Sure.
Let's look at it from the point of view of Rogers' popular diffusion model.
According to this theory innovation as a social phenomenon is essentially the communication of randomly appearing new ideas of practices and the successful diffusion and adoption of those ideas relies on the availability of communication channels between five increasingly risk averse segments of the population.
So to be a successfully diffused innovation, an idea has to successively be adopted successively by:
And the criteria that people use to select what they do and do not adopt are:
Now having established a model, the question is how does regulation and the establishment of norms affect these factors? What does good and bad regulation look like from our model and how likely are they?
Bad regulation is highly normative and costly. It lowers potential compatibility by adding requirements that potential new practices and ideas may not follow. Good regulation makes the existing landscape accessible for new entrants and interoperable with potentially novel uses.
Bad regulation requires high upfront investments that make adoption a risk. Good regulation provides for trials and experiments.
Bad regulation equalizes outcomes so that relative advantage is marginal. Good regulation lets winners win big.
Bad regulation makes the benefits of novel approaches impossible to demonstrate. Good regulation allows them to be obvious.
Bad regulation prevents people from obtaining the skills and knowledge to implement new approaches. Good regulation provides them those skills and knowledge.
Now that we have a good idea of what a good and a bad policy look like, let's make a detour through another area of sociology to figure out what types of regulation institutions and states tend to develop over time.
In Michels' famous study of the eponymous Political Parties, he develops a general sociological theory of institutions that is nowadays mostly known under the name of the "iron law of oligarchy".
This theory provides that any democratic institution (a fortiori any institution) always tends towards oligarchy because the "tactical and technical necessities" of power condition the playing field so that the people who end up leading any institution are always those most organized and motivated by power because this makes them uniquely fit to this selection environment.
In short, as Leach summarizes the theory: "Bureacracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts.".
Trivially, the people who write legislation are participants in an organization, therefore participants in a destined oligarchy and ultimately moved, at the asymptote, by the increase of their power and control and the centralization thereof. This was later described as well by Weber, Galbraith and other sociologists.
As I am sure you understand, this is not the crucible for good regulation in the sense that we are disposed to here.
A centralized bureaucracy needs the world to be understandable to it (see Scott's Seeing Like a State), and it needs it to change slowly enough that the control mechanisms can keep up. This therefore leads to ever increasing lists of demands that require high upfront investments, are specifically designed to prevent powerful new entrants, offer rigid frameworks where it is hard to show the benefits of ideas that upset the established order and ultimately where the availability of financially liquid risk takers is deliberately minimized because the "technokings" are a rival castle.
To give more power, in any quantity, to any human institution is therefore, by necessity, to put oneself on the road to prevent innovation. Because power is threatened by innovation. And as Schmitt rightfully observes, power can stand no rivals.
You may notice the paradox present here, in that innovation itself is such an act. And every rebel is always grooming himself into a new master.
Machiavelli and his followers, myself included, understand that freedom, a fortiori innovation, can only really be found in the cracks of this endless struggle. And thus, I cherish any haven that is beyond the control of power and will defend it, not out of the misplaced sense of self important artistry that you seem to identify, but because it is the only respite that we have against the violence of our condition. And I said as much, in not so long winded a fashion, in my original answer.
Those are plenty interesting general characteristics, and I don't object to much. Now, perhaps attention can be turned toward applying these ideas to the regulation at hand. I spoke to some reasons why I think this document leans much more toward the "good regulation" side than the "bad regulation" side. It seems plenty open to all sorts of innovative products in the IoT space and has very little that seems likely to affect the development of new features and products, except perhaps some edge cases. Any thoughts?
Well my thoughts are that yet again you are deliberately refusing to address the slippery slope and thus that this conversation has come to an end.
What part would you like me to address? You spoke of "good regulation" and "bad regulation" first, so it would make sense to start with that discussion and then see how it flows into other pieces. I'm really not sure what you're demanding of me.
Read the whole post please.
You asked for a more detailed argument and explanation of why the slope is slippery, I gave you one. If you're going to refuse to address the whole argument and revert back to discussing the specifics of the regulation like you seem to enjoy instead of addressing the tendency, it's pointless for me to produce anything because you're never going to discuss why people disagree with you.
Which as has been pointed out to you numerous times now, has nothing to do with the specifics of this particular regulation.
I read the whole post. You started off talking about good regulation and bad regulation, then got to some considerations of slippery slope dynamics. Is the former part just irrelevant? I was going by Grice's maxims that it did, in fact, have relevance. It seems like it is relevant to the dynamics of slippery slope dynamics. If it's not relevant, please let me know. I'd especially like to know why you don't actually think it's relevant. Do you think that it actually doesn't matter whether something is a 'good regulation' or a 'bad regulation', and that the only thing that matters is the slippery slope part, where you think that all regulations end up in the bad category? If so, it would have been nice if you said something along these lines. I was just trying to go through your considerations in a systematic fashion.
What I think, which I have now stated numerous times, including in my first response, is that the specifics of any particular regulation and how good it is aren't relevant, what is relevant is the tendency of organizations that are allowed and legitimated in producing such regulation.
However reasonable a given rule is of no consequence if it enables unreasonable rules to be made and if unreasonable rule makers necessarily outcompete reasonable rule makers.
Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that this regulation is a good one. It has no effect on the validity of the argument or on my support or opposition to it on the grounds I have stated. Evaluating it alone with this criteria is therefore pointless.
Ok, so "read the whole post" means "ignore the first two thirds and just read the last third". Got it. Violates Grice's maxims and makes you a bad communication entity, but got it.
Ok, so flesh out those "ifs". In your long post, you spoke about power rising up to take power. In this context, it would sound like what you're worried about is cashing out in terms of regulatory capture/crony capitalism. That powerful corporate interests will rise to impose unreasonable regulations to form barriers to entry. This is a totally plausible thing to happen, and perhaps we could consider some reasoning for when this is likely to happen/not happen, and how damaging it is likely to be in a particular domain. Plausibly, this has something to do with the regulations in question or the regulatory bodies in question, or something. Or is this truly just a long-form way of restating, "Once we've crossed epsilon, the worst conclusion in inevitable."
No. This frame of understanding it is much to narrow and presupposes some distinction between the private and public sector which is fictitious and is only a feature of Liberal social theory and its derivatives.
It's not powerful corporate interests that rise up. It's powerful interests of any kind.
It does not. This phenomenon is a feature of all human organizations.
You asked for a full explanation of my position. I've not changed my mind. I'm just explaining why I believe what I believe. And that does include that this epsilon regulation is teologically undesirable.
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