Washington needs four pages to let the tech industry regulate itself

Washington needs four pages to let the tech industry regulate itself.

Four pages. That’s all the most powerful government in the world needs to ensure that nobody regulates anything. Not a policy document, a napkin covered in excuses, legally binding once Congress signs it, with an attorney general who already has a task force standing by to sue anyone who doesn’t respect the napkin.

It’s called a framework. Frameworks hold things in place. This one holds exactly one thing in place. Everything else is free to fall. Children, workers, states that went to the trouble of writing laws, they all fall, and the Justice Department’s lawyers are waiting at the bottom to help with the landing. How thoughtful.

The smartest line isn’t in the document. It’s in the press releases of the companies that commissioned it. Jack Dorsey just said it out loud: a significantly smaller team can do more with the tools we’re building. Not a forecast. A statement. Block cut forty percent. Gemini thirty. Congress has rejected preemption twice, the second time 99 votes to 1, but round three starts now, with the same napkin and a federal prosecutor warming up on the sidelines. You knew this.

Parents will handle it. That’s in there too. Parents get tools and account controls for platforms that have internally determined parental oversight doesn’t work. Meta knows. TikTok knows. The White House knows. The tools aren’t protection, they’re paperwork. Proof that someone tried, ready to deploy when the damage needs to be documented. And the damage will be documented.

Copyright goes to the courts, not because the legal question is unsettled, but because the companies that used training data are large enough to keep cases running for ten years. The courts are the trash can for decisions nobody wanted to make.

Whoever defines “unduly burdensome” controls everything. That definition isn’t in the document. It’s in the lobbying budgets of the companies that have already furnished the vacuum as an office. Furniture’s in. Receptionist too.

They call it governance.