You also end up with a growing group of individuals whose livelihood is tied to whatever the regulatory regime is. If you are paying people to write new laws an

You also end up with a growing group of individuals whose livelihood is tied to whatever the regulatory regime is. If you are paying people to write new laws and regulate things, they are going to write even more regulations. Whether or not the insidiousness of this was intentionally malicious doesn't matter, you end up with a bureaucracy that only stops after a revolution or significant political change. Some of these people are directly employed by the government, others are tied to (government funded) non-profits. They may have good intentions, but it is the end results that matter. Ultimately, they will not speak against the self-interest of their own group. From the standpoint of software development, think of it as a codebase you can't refactor but has an endless stream of new business logic which may or may not conform well with the database structure. Eventually it just stops working. To speak about Google/Microsoft/Big Tech in particular, it isn't just legal resources - it is overall resources. Doing basic things get a lot more expensive and slow.