The Sultan of Kinakuta and Larry Page on government regulations
I noticed an interesting parallel between two statements made by powerful figures.
First the Sultan of Kinakuta:
First the Sultan of Kinakuta:
Perhaps I can make an analogy to Go... At the beginning of the game, the pieces are arranged in a pattern that is simple and easy to understand. The players make small decisions, one turn at a time, each decision fairly simple in and of itself, and made for reasons that can be easily understood, even by a novice. But over the course of many such turns, the pattern develops such great complexity that only the finest minds... can comprehend it... The analogy is clear. Our policies concerning free speech, telecommunications, and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple, rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken together.Next, Larry Page, CEO of Google, in response to a question "What would be government 2.0 in your mind?":
I do worry that when I look at... our interactions with governments or the things we get interested in, you know spectrum or whatever, that it becomes pretty illogical. And I think the reasons aren't that the people aren't good and that they're not trying to do good things. I mean most people you talk to in government, you know, are in there for the right reasons, they're not there for the pay, typically. They're there because they want to make the world better. But I think the set of rules that we have... One thing that I would observe is that the complexity of government increases over time. So you just look at all of our democracies around the world... The amount of regulation and law that we have, increases without bound.
So I was trying to reduce the complexity in Google. I was thinking, we're getting to be a bigger company, let's take our rules and regulations, let's ... make sure they stay at fifty pages, so that people can actually read it. But the problem that I discovered about that was that by reference we include the entire law and regulation of the entire world. Because we're a multinational company, we operate everywhere, our employees, what they do affects everything and so in some sense we'd have to read the 100 million pages of law and regulation that are out there....The first quote is from a novel published in 1999: Cryptonomicon. The second quote is from a video made in 2014.