Greetings from Brussels, where I just moderated a session (on ethical A.I.) at the Tech.eu Summit. Unsurprisingly given the location, regulation is a recurring topic at this technology conference, but some of the voices calling for more of it may come as a surprise.
One of the most interesting speakers here is Miki Kuusi, cofounder of Finland-based delivery firm Wolt, which DoorDash bought for $7.5 billion last year. Kuusi is now both Wolt’s CEO and DoorDash’s head of international and would like to see more regulation of the gig economy. Why? Because it allows Wolt to treat its people well without being effectively penalized.
“We want to do the right thing, so we’re self-regulating,” Kuusi said onstage. “What pisses me off like hell is seeing a competitor that’s literally getting a competitive advantage because they don’t do the same thing.”
I caught up with Kuusi afterward to get more clarity on that. “If you look at the courier side of the work, it’s basically a balance between freedom and flexibility—this is why most people want to do this kind of app-enabled work,” he told me. “But you also need to have meaningful earnings for the work you do, and you also need to have protections and safety nets if something goes wrong.
“We regulate ourselves when it comes to making sure the earnings are high enough. We see competitors that don’t necessarily do that. We self-regulate when it comes to having global insurances for our couriers, which not every company is doing,” he said. “These are things that are in terms of values that are important to us, but I think these shouldn’t be up to values. This should be something that is not just possible to do, but also demanded of every company in the industry.”
That’s a very different tune to what we used to hear from the gig-work sector, which was not so long ago desperate to avoid regulation—not least because being under-regulated allowed them to outcompete traditional rivals that were burdened with loads of rules, such as the taxi industry.
But it’s a refrain we hear again and again these days, from a variety of tech players. Currently, the most prominent example is the A.I. industry, in which we see leading lights such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman touring the world, begging for regulation not just at the national but global level.
Given the white-hot level of competition in A.I., it’s easy to take a cynical view of these calls, not least because the giants emitting them have resources to deal with regulatory compliance that smaller upstarts lack.
That’s a very real problem, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. The likes of Altman and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai know they have to contend with a public that deeply, deeply distrusts A.I. That’s going to stifle uptake, and regulation could mitigate that problem. There’s also the age-old factor of certainty: better the regulation you know than the regulation that might give you a nasty surprise down the line.
But I also think A.I. leaders are genuinely concerned about the implications of A.I.’s rapid evolution, and see regulation as a way of avoiding the worst outcomes. Like Kuusi, maybe they want to do the right thing, and need regulation to ensure that rivals can’t force them to take a different route by operating with less noble motives.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of these various imperatives. But one thing is for sure: Regulation is no longer anathema to the tech sector. That’s a sign of a maturing industry with unprecedented significance to society. As Kuusi told me about the phenomenon: “I think it’s about size and scale first and foremost.”
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
