Everyone is wrong about AI regulation, and the history of the Internet proves it

If the early days of AI were marked by a laissez-faire approach, 2026 will be the year of intense battles over regulation and who, if anyone, gets to control it.

I think back to the early Internet, specifically the 1992-1994 period, when high-speed connections were sparse and the web still mostly described something spiders built.

The Information Superhighway that the World Wide Web spawned (built on the Internet's framework) was like the establishment of a vast and rapidly-growing city that anyone with a connection could visit; no passports or border security stood guard, and no one checked who built a business or information repository or what any of them might contain. It was the wild west, and for years, government officials at virtually all levels took a decidedly hands-off approach. As with other tech epochs, the vast majority of officials barely understood the Web, let ...