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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I haven't heard that definition of "Regulatory Capture" before. I mostly thought it was just when the regulators are working for industry instead of the people. That is, the regulators have been "Captured." The politicians who nominate the regulatory bodies are paid off by industry to keep it that way.

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Regulatory capture has different flavours, but it basically comes down to the regulated taking control of or significantly influencing the regulator. It can be by the complete sector, but in my experience most often by the leading incumbants in a domain.

It can be through keeping regulation to be mild or look the other way, but as often to put up high cost/high compliance burdens in place to pull up the drawbridge for new entrants.

You’re correct that this is the broad definition, but GP is correct that that is a very common form of regulatory capture in the US.

I’ve seen this happen many times during the RFI/RFP process for large projects, the largest players put boots on the ground early and try to get into the ears of the decision makers and their consultants and “helpfully” educate them. On multiple occasions I’ve seen requests actually using a specific vendor’s product name as a generic term without realizing it, when their competitors’ products worked in a completely different way and didn’t have a corresponding component in their offering.

I agree. I wasn't trying to strictly define it just specify the form it usually takes.

In the case of OpenAI, were I to guess, they'll likely do things like push for stronger copyright laws or laws against web scraping. Things that look harmless but ultimately will squash new competitors in the AI market. Now that they already have a bunch of the data to train their models, they'll be happy to make it a little harder for them to get new data if it means they don't have to compete.

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