Yet another debt issue we don’t talk about enough
Welcome to the third issue of my monthly newsletter
I'll be sharing analysis and short stories about digital transformation, practical recommendations, or recommended reading on this platform.
This month, some thoughts about policy debt. We are familiar with the concept of debt, e.g. national or personal financial debt. In the IT industry we are also familiar with the issue of technological debt, although we don’t often talk about it. Here I want to talk about another overlooked kind of debt that is highly relevant to digital governance: policy debt.
Please enjoy!
From student loans and mortgages to national debt, we are familiar with the concept of financial debt. And although it might sometimes be incentivized the general notion is clear: you do not want to have too much debt. That is due to the fact that debt acts as a burden, limiting options or at least increasing the cost of them. If you are already heavily in debt, raising new funds or getting another line of credit will be more difficult and through interest, the cost for servicing the existing debt grows over time.
This logic can also be applied outside the financial world as software engineers already realized in the early 1990s. They coined the term technical or technological debt. Rather than talking about borrowing this kind of debt is created by not addressing issues that arise from increased complexity and poor software code which can be due to a variety of reasons, from business pressure to release code quickly – a topic in itself for another issue of this newsletter when we talk about innovation more broadly – to poor know-how of the existing codebase. Various factors such as the spread of low-code or no-code applications and poor incentives for the industry as a whole have created a true technological debt pile, e.g. in cloud security.
It is bad enough that this issue isn’t been talked about enough and addressed but if you follow the digital governance discourse – from regulation of social media to cybersecurity policy or AI governance – you realize that this problem is compounded by yet another type of debt: policy debt. Like technological debt, policy debt accrues by either kicking the can down the road and not discussing certain complex questions, hoping they’ll resolve over time, or adding poor content to the “codebase”, i.e. drafting and implementing poorly written regulations.
Take the case of social media and artificial intelligence. Both topics might not have a lot in common at first but start digging deeper and soon the political debate will revolve about old questions of copyright infringement, liability for content, and data protection. All issues that already surfaced with the advent of the Internet several decades ago! The reason that we keep coming back to those old questions is, that they have not been resolved in a way that keeps all relevant stakeholders happy, thus adding to policy debt.
Or take the case of cybersecurity. You’d think that given that the Internet started as a defense project at the height of the cold war, security would be a core strength. But that is not the case at all, as the protocols and infrastructure that still underpin the Internet and by extension the digital economy today, were built on resilience, not security. With record levels of attacks and growing geopolitical competition, paired with the fact that security experts have been recommending action for decades, exasperated participants at a recent cybersecurity conference in Munich went as far as declaring a market failure for cybersecurity and calling for nothing short of a policy revolution.
Digital Governance and the associated policy discourse needs to step into the spotlight. Given the importance of digital technologies and their impact on societies, policymakers and voters should no longer ignore the impressive policy debt pile and start work on reducing it through constructive debate and sensible solutions.
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