Other podcast summaries: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/artist/5-minute-podcast-summaries/1561014470

Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/australia-vs-facebook-how-regulation-is-splintering/id1011668648?i=1000513231071

Moving fast is important, but moving in the right direction is more important.

Key ideas: The differences of passing regulation of smaller versus larger countries, how more regulation helps incumbents & how the increasing polarizations of countries harms consumers.

Who is Scott Farquhar:

• Co-founder and co‐CEO of Atlassian, Austalia's largest tech company & a leading enterprise software company that powers other companies to build better software
• One of the founders of pledge 1% which is a global movement that's pledged hundreds of millions of dollars by commiting 1% of equity, product, profit, and/or employee time of companies to their communities.

Idea 1 @17mins: 

• Australia being a smaller country with only ~25million people, means Australia is a bit of a testbed of how things might end up for other places in the world. Because of our regulatory regime, we're a parliamentary democracy, where we don't really have a third system of government, our legislature both runs the country and enact our laws, which means a lot of laws can be enacted faster than other juristictions, and because we're a relatively smaller as a country, we can move a bit faster.   We're a bit of a testbed for a lot of legislation on a whole bunch of areas such as encryption & privacy, anti-trust involving media & big technology, skilled migration. A lot of things are being tested in Australia that can potentially have global implications.

Idea 2 @ 33mins: 

• More regulation isn't always good. Additional regulation often benefits the larger incumbents, because the large existing companies can amortise all of the costs associated with having to meet the rules and regulations across all their products and revenues.  Whilst, new entrants will have a much harder time doing this, and can often be discouraged because of how much friction there is to meet the rules and regulations.

Idea 3 @ 44mins: 

• The increasing polarisation of the world with geo politics is a net negative for the world because something that would’ve taken 2,000 engineers that can be sold to the entire world could now take 20,000 engineers because you need to make it 10 times for different countries. This is a lower economies of scales, which means lower efficiency because it's a duplication of resources which ultimately means that consumers are worse off.

1 question:

• Can you think of something where you should've thought more about which direction to go in before going as fast as you could in that direction?

Other topics:

• Why understanding public policy is now key to running a tech company, and how global polarization has impacted Atlassian.
• What's happening with Australian government versus Facebook/Google RE the Australian Media Bargaining Code.
• How can governments and tech companies work better together.