For decades, Washington has treated tech issues as a policy afterthought, even as computers and smartphones have become ubiquitous in everyday life. Recurring high-profile controversies surrounding social media have led to calls for action, only to result in lawmakers deferring to industry-favored self-regulation rules. Lawmakers' supposedly poor understanding of technology, the factor generally credited for this cycle of inaction, is emphasized to the point of obscuring the primary culprit. Capitol Hill's consistent failure to regulate tech industry harms is a standard example of major corporations wielding their power wielding their power to influence lawmakers tasked with overseeing them.

In the 2020s, AI development has once again brought the dangers posed by an unregulated tech industry to the public eye. Unregulated AI services, including chatbots and particularly autonomous agents, stand to both reflect and accelerate the same underlying harms of legacy social media platforms. The urgency of the current moment has been met with mounting efforts by policymakers seeking to avoid past failures on areas such as privacy reform. Nevertheless, it is crucial that any measures to regulate AI harms do not end up entrenching the power of corporations they are meant to regulate.