American authors have long been fascinated by the dry gusts that rush across the south of California, the Santa Ana winds, understanding them as a force capable of bringing destruction through wildfire and even, some have speculated, other kinds of chaos. This year, the Santa Ana winds are bringing 13 new tech regulation laws to California. While the powerful, at times catastrophic, gusts are broken before they can extend past the state, no such buffer is guaranteed for these regulations. Through litigation and legislation, California’s regulators are relying on two false premises that threaten to impede American tech leadership during a time when it is more crucial than ever. 

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills into law last week, touting them as “the strongest child safety and chatbot social media laws in the nation.” The laws cover a variety of areas, from AI chatbots to social media use, and prescribe restricting content at the government’s discretion and age verification protocols along with strict penalties for noncompliance. For instance, the troubling Assembly Bill 1709 mandates age verification and places the broad burden on social media companies to ensure that “addictive material” is not served to users under 13 years of age. This places extremely personal data (submitted by all users, minors and adults alike, through age verification) in the hands of tech companies and extremely personal value judgments (about what kind of content is “addictive”) in the hands of California’s government and litigators. 

Touting the sweeping nature of the new laws, Governor  Newsom remarked “As innovation moves faster our protections must keep pace. Today’s legislation makes clear that California will not stand by while unregulated technology puts our children at risk.” 

Newsom, like other lawmakers who have pursued regulatory regimes as the remedy to the risks that accompany innovation, relies on two false premises. 

The first is the assumption that regulation is capable of keeping lockstep pace with the ever-changing and rapidly progressing world of technology. No other policy area operates under such a notion, that new laws must be crafted to preempt every possible scenario. Rather, prudent lawmakers understand that crafting a law requires foresight and an eye for durability, and that often, laws already on the books are capable of addressing issues at hand. This is particularly true of technology, a field that changes constantly and relies heavily on trial, error, and feedback from the free market. 

The second is the assumption that technology — especially social media -– is an “unregulated” wild west. Social media and AI companies are under deep scrutiny. Consumer protection laws, privacy and data protections, content removal mandates, anti-discrimination laws and the like govern companies’ behavior. Moreover, parents around the nation have shown their willingness to criticize and limit their children’s use of social media. Concerned families are perhaps the most powerful tool for changing the social media landscape, as they are also the consumers determining which products succeed and which ones lose customers and revenue. Acknowledging this reality, all major social media platforms are equipped with at least some degree of parental controls, if not an entirely different version just for users under the age of 18. 

These assumptions — that lawmakers must anticipate and respond to every change in the tech world, and that technology like social media and AI is unregulated — underlie nearly every effort at expanding the bureaucracy governing American technology. Combatting these suppositions requires realism about the pace of the legislative process, the responsive capabilities of the free market, and the current regulatory landscape. The stakes are high for the United States’ tech industry. China is pouring resources into innovation and AI technology, and a nation’s strength is increasingly tied to its technological standing. Gusts of Californian bureaucracy should not blow across the country. Our future global standing depends on it. 

 

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Artificial intelligenceCaliforniaGovernment regulationSocial mediaTechnology policyChild SafetyChinaElectronic Frontier FoundationReason
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