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Once you've changed your culture from "building cool stuff" to "checking regulatory boxes and making sure all the regulation-following is documented", you've already done a vast amount of damage. Even if the regulations themselves aren't too onerous.
Can you propose a way that we could change the culture to "do the trivial basic shit so we don't have billions of abhorrently bad products permeating all of our networks"? I'm wide open to ideas you have for how to do this without making anyone check any boxes, but it seems a little unlikely that they won't have to somehow come up with a culture that at least considers having a box for "is this thing not trivially insecure against a handful of the most basic mistakes that everyone has known about for years?"
No, you're asking for an impossibility. You can't have one culture which is both open to new ideas and dedicated to checking boxes.
Ok, I think we've made progress. It is literally impossible for the culture to bother taking the most basic steps to make the billions of devices on our networks not trivially hackable without causing some folks like you to shut down and stop being open to new ideas. These are the stakes as you have presented them. The only question that seems to be available to the general public is what they value.
Different folks can have different values and different answers. I personally fall on the side that I think you're actually just delivering a bullshit threat that is based on a lie. That it's akin to a child swearing that they're going to hold their breath until they die unless you let them have more cookies. No better than saying, "Nice IoT development space you have there; would be a shame if something happened to it." No better than a monopolist swearing that if you let others enter the market, shoddy products will kill everyone. That it's a false dichotomy, propped up just so you can avoid even the smallest iota of boredom, purely in your own self-interest.
But whatever. My opinion on that isn't important. You've laid down the stakes. Society made its choice years ago when California gave the first checkbox. The deed is already done. The only thing left is for us to watch what happens. Does innovation actually die? Do people actually just stop thinking about new ideas, because they might have to not put a default password on their new idea? I guess we'll find out.
No, it's literally impossible to make a regulatory culture without shutting down new ideas. Perhaps there's some other way to get the result, but you can't have a culture with both properties. Once you put the commissars in place, initiative declines sharply, and that's unavoidable.
We've already found out in other areas. We just refuse to learn the lesson.
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