Well, it's not black and white. Regulation hinders progress and makes things more expensive. But no regulation raises costs and hinders progress too: it basica

Well, it's not black and white. Regulation hinders progress and makes things more expensive. But no regulation raises costs and hinders progress too: it basically creates a situation of very low trust, and low trust is extremely expensive for customers/buyers who are not domain experts. This also makes them overcautious and conservative. One needs a balance and lots of nuance to make a reasonably well functioning market/system. The case against regulation on software business is not that "regulation is bad". It's that programming and software is very new and rapidly evolving area of human activity. It's not nearly as well understood as building houses. Written and unwritten standards and best practices are constantly changing. The field is subject to very strong fashion-driven "crazes". (Just look at how many new languages are still being created. Most don't become as widespread as C++ or Java or Python, but many do find their niche, and very many are in use to some extent. This indicates that "language Holy Graal" is nowhere to be seen yet.) In software, there is very little consensus between domain experts on most issues. This is very unlike construction and house building, where some new materials ant techniques are introduced too, but the basic principles are well understood, calculable, and where agreement among experts is usually quite achievable. So arguably it's nearly impossible to create good regulation at this stage, at least outside of certain special niches. This is very different from building codes and stuff. Of course there is also bad regulation. The bureaucracy likes to expand their control indefinitely, wants to regulate things that should not be regulated, thus (if unchecked) creating very bad regulation. Well, that's the case for checks and balances, for the society to fight back. But "this regulation is bad and needs to be changed" is a much more mature position than "we need no f*g regulation!", in my opinion...