Adam Thierer@AdamThierer
8) Is permissionless innovation a partisan right-wing thing?
No, permissionless innovation is not a partisan term or movement. At least it shouldn’t be. In my book and other writings, I have pointed out how the Clinton administration’s 1997 Framework for Global Electronic Commerce is probably the most concise articulation of permissionless innovation that any government has ever promulgated. “The Internet should develop as a market driven arena not a regulated industry,” it noted, while “governments should avoid undue restrictions on electronic commerce.” It also said “parties should be able to enter into legitimate agreements to buy and sell products and services across the Internet with minimal government involvement or intervention.” Finally, “where governmental involvement is needed,” the Framework continued, “its aim should be to support and enforce a predictable, minimalist, consistent and simple legal environment for commerce.” That's the permissionless innovation vision in a nutshell.
People on opposite sides of the political spectrum are often united in the belief that permissionless innovation is crucial to prosperity and human flourishing.
For example, while they both once worked at PayPal, Reid Hoffman and David Sacks went down very different paths politically after that. Hoffman became the co-founder of LinkedIn and a leading support of Democrats and President Biden. By contrast, Sacks became a successful venture capitalist and a strong supporter of Donald Trump, going on to serve as AI and crypto czar in the Trump administration. They disagree bitterly about many issues.
Despite their differences, however, both Hoffman and Sacks agree that permissionless innovation powered the digital revolution and can propel the AI revolution next. “Permissionless innovation in AI is working more effectively than ever,” Reid Hoffman argued in a 2025 tweet. “It's what will keep the US at the forefront of Al development. It is arguably the most important time to move quickly. Anti-tech critics who insist on hitting the brakes, full stop, are misguided,” he argued. David Sacks concurs, noting in a late 2025 podcast that, “the thing that has really made Silicon Valley special over the past several decades is permissionless innovation.” By contrast, what is being contemplated for AI “is an approval system for both software and hardware” where “you have to go to Washington to get permission before you release a new model." This would “drastically slow down innovation and make America less competitive,” Sacks argued.
At the same time, however, the concept of permissionless innovation has also come under fire from technocrats on both left and right. Left-leaning scholars at Brookings celebrate what they see as “the end of permissionless innovation,” and progressive academics have attacked the concept relentlessly on many different grounds. Meanwhile, some conservatives such as Trump-appointed FTC commissioner Mark Meadow decry permissionless innovation as “a progressive impulse, not a conservative one.” He argues it “is antithetical to the conservative’s considered preservation of custom and tradition and our commitment to the rule of law.”
Sometimes the concept of permissionless innovation has even come under fire from groups that nominally support expanding innovation opportunities, but find something distasteful about the term—at least as they (mis)conceptualize it. For example, two top officials at the Foundation for American Innovation say permissionless innovation amounts to little more than a “legitimizing facade for anarcho-capitalists, tech bros, and cynical corporate flacks” and represents a “shallow ideological slogan.” And this comes from a group with "innovation" in its title!
There are two things that generally unify the varied critics of permissionless innovation. The first is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the term represents, or an intentional effort to equate it with anarchism or a self-serving corporate agenda, even though it is nothing of the sort. Properly understood, permissionless innovation is about creating a policy environment conducive to new entry, entrepreneurialism, creative destruction, and openness to ongoing disruption of the status quo. It is all too often the case that established players and “corporate flacks” are the ones standing in the way of progress. I’ve often joked with people that, when I retire, I will be writing one final book entitled: “Why Businesses Make the Worst Capitalists.” I’ve spent decades fighting corporations, trade associations, and other special interests who only care about defending their own narrow interests, and not a broader environment of innovation freedom. They are every bit as bad as the extremist academic reactionaries who rail against permissionless innovation and, in many cases, those private interests do more damage because of how politically connected they are. True defenders of permissionless innovation understand that our greatest fight is often against those who would use the power of government to protect themselves from technological change while throwing their competitors under the bus. Yet, for whatever reason, many critics of permissionless innovation like to rail against the term when they see cronyist corporations or special interests gain advantage using political leverage. That is a plainly incorrect understanding of the term.
The second factor that often unifies opponents of permissionless innovation is a technocratic impulse to control the future according to some sort of grand blueprint or elitist design. In The Future and Its Enemies, Postrel explained how the opponents of dynamism (another word for what permissionless innovation embodies) are unified by a strong distaste of “a future that is dynamic and inherently unstable” and that is full of “complex messiness.” The critics simply cannot tolerate that inherent messiness and, therefore, they look to soothe us “with the reassurance that some authority will make everything turn out right,” she argued. “They promise to make the world safe and predictable, if only we will trust them to design the future, if only they can impose their uniform plans,” Postrel noted.
This is precisely why we see “horseshoe theory” at work in such a major way in modern tech policy debates. At some point, the reactionaries and technocrats on the edges of the political spectrum bend around and meet at a destination called CONTROL. Of course, they all have a different central blueprint, and disagree about the motivations and methods for how to get to that final destination. But, nominally, they all hate the idea of permissionless innovation because it embraces the benefits of “complex messiness,” bottom-up evolutionary processes, spontaneous order, and freedom of choice. Paternalistic elitists just cannot tolerate any of that because it runs counter to their desired control plans for society.
