For the most part, I think the conclusion that "a regulator is needed" is usually reached by people who have very little experience with one. Regulators are mo

For the most part, I think the conclusion that "a regulator is needed" is usually reached by people who have very little experience with one. Regulators are more flexible than legislatures, but are still not very flexible in practice. The difference is mostly that they can enforce rules more effectively, but the rulemaking itself is not generally very good. Causation runs at least partially the other way, but think of the current industries that are heavily regulated: banking, medicine, tobacco... First, they regulate relative to very legible rulesets. Even if they start with broad mandates, once enforcement gets going, a specific ruleset emerges. A common goal is "better inform the consumer." Pharmaceutical side effects, banking fees, how we use cookies. This nearly always becomes a joke. The company does not want to highlight information, but they have too. Regulators chase, fine, and sanction. Eventually, we get popups, small print, and quickfire lists of "disclosure". All that stuff becomes essentially mandatory. Second, "compliance" becomes a power word, within companies. The lawyers and bureaucrats get much more powerful. Also, regulating industries is almost always big firm and incumbent friendly. Calling these businesses hard to enter is an understatement. You basically can't start a tobacco company or bank unless you already are one, or are well connected and wealthy. Idk what the solution is, but I doubt it is this. We'll see how GDPR plays out, but I'm not holding my breath. The problem (imo) is that the internet is a communication technology. These have network effects, and centralisation tendencies. In a perfect world, the solutions to the problem (I agree with tbl about the problem) are protocols, browsers and the like. If email wasn't a protocol/standard, it'd have been invented as a proprietary service. But, since the standard existed and was popular...it lives. Building onto emails, in an open way, generally failed. So, email lists gave way to proprietary services. There are still parts of the internet that are open like this. Podcasts is an interesting one. It gained a lot of ground recently in the mature web era. On the business end, podcasts seem to be much better for the content makers than YouTube or other distribution methods. Interesting. They seem like an echo from an older internet. A lot of things could have beeen standards, app stores, social networks.. a lot of things could have been solved by the browser, including half the stuff "regulators" are trying to fix now. Ultimately, online tracking works because browsers & standards let it happen. It's just hard, and the incentive to grab a little internet fief is too strong. In some ways, it's surprising the web is as open as it is.