The Race to Regulate New Tech: Q&A with Asad Ramzanali

Asad Ramzanali has had a wide-ranging career. After college, he worked on business strategy and start-up investing in Silicon Valley and developed a strong understanding of how large companies like Intuit operate and how start-ups grow. But when he thought about graduate school, he decided to pursue a public policy degree so his impact could scale. He went on to advise members of Congress and then serve as Chief of Staff and a Deputy Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Ramzanali currently works as Director of AI and Technology Policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and as an advisor to Roosevelt’s Good Life Residency on AI. He participated in the Roosevelt Society’s first mid-career professional development cohort.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

How It Started

I had many watershed moments. As one example, I interned for a US senator’s district office during my undergrad years and got to see a tiny bit of how government works. I learned a lot from it, but I was ultimately dissuaded from feeling that I could do something meaningful in an environment like that—in a way where I would be personally useful and contribute to something bigger. I saw the important work her office did, but I didn’t quite see the bigger picture of what government could or should do.

Over time, seeing the state’s inability to regulate problems emerging from the tech industry, I found myself returning to the idea that when government doesn’t work—especially when it doesn’t work—that government should work. The world I want to live in is one where we as a public have a way to solve big problems. That led to the winding path of my career.

All of my experiences and views led me to think about applying to business schools. But in a particular moment of complaining about government and politics, I reflected on my own trajectory and asked myself, why don’t I also apply to public policy school? I could complain, or I could be part of the solution.

That was less about which type of grad school I went to, or what degree I’d get, and more about where I wanted to spend my time in school and afterward. It’s not that I thought working at a company was bad. It’s that I thought about my time as a whole and where I want to be useful.

It’s that I wanted to operate at the scale of affecting the public, of benefiting the public, and of improving the lives of the public.

On the Current Moment

One of the concerns I’ve long had is that our systems of democratic governance over large, significant companies and industries—not just in tech, but more broadly—have atrophied.

Our ability to think about applying a set of public-benefit requirements to companies—regulation—has atrophied, and the skills of people to enforce regulation and of society to accept it have atrophied.

The modern tech industry, in particular, arose during a time when the government lacked the capacity and desire to use long-standing laws to make markets fairer, encourage competition, and protect consumers. Now, the tech world is so far from an understanding of democratic governance that we have what I think of as “regulatory debt.”

In the tech world, we have something called “technical debt.” When you build software, over time it accumulates layers of shortcuts and bad code, and you just keep fixing the small broken things immediately in front of you, rather than realizing that the layers of brokenness mean you should re-architect the whole system.

That’s where we are with regulatory debt in relation to the tech industry. We should have passed a privacy law at least a decade ago, maybe earlier. We should have updated antitrust laws years ago. We should have dealt with social media’s problems—disinformation, harms to kids, dark patterns—as those issues arose. But we didn’t.

On the bright side, now with the rise of AI, we have the opportunity, and responsibility, to re-architect the regulatory system. I’m hopeful we’ll be more successful in that endeavor than we were with previous rounds of tech harms.

On the Work

We’re nowhere near where we need to be in tech policy. I have long been frustrated that we’re not at an outcome that feels like the right equilibrium for society.

At times, it feels like we can’t even see a good equilibrium from where we are.

I worry a lot about institutions that are breaking. I worry a lot about norms that are breaking. I worry, perhaps most, about people’s understanding of what government can do. And I think it’s all breaking in a way that will require complete rebuilding.

We should start with direct questions: What are the people asking for? What do they need? How can government respond to those desires and needs in meaningful, demonstrable ways?

The goal shouldn’t be, as it sometimes feels, to issue a press release that celebrates the smallest step of progress. Let’s identify actual needs and desires, and deliver solutions at a scale commensurate with those needs and desires.

For example, if people are upset about constant surveillance, we should ban surveillance business models and stop companies from collecting and selling unnecessary personal data. We shouldn’t pass a law that requires a regulation to incentivize companies to allow consumers to opt out of certain data practices, company by company, hidden in a setting that’s hard to find.

Let’s be more direct, bold, and intentional. Let’s pick the problems we want to solve, vet that those are the right problems, then actually solve them.

I think about this in a couple of different ways. On the one hand, I’ve helped members of Congress write several tech policy bills that were well written and recognized as such. It felt good to see positive reactions about those efforts. But on the other hand, and far more importantly, those bills didn’t pass into law. It’s frustrating to see how many great policy ideas gathered dust and just didn’t move forward, even though they could have protected people from real harm. 

But to me, that’s part of the fight we have to continue because there is no plan B. A democratically elected set of representatives setting the rules for how companies should operate is plan A. It’s the right structure, so we have to fight to make it work.

What Gives Him Hope

We can start by asking, “What is the world we need to live in?”

The world I want to live in is one where we can use innovation and technology to the best of our abilities to solve the problems we need to solve as a country.

The director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the last administration, [Arati Prabhakar], would often say things like, “A great nation should have great aspirations.”

Better health outcomes, a cleaner environment, an energy system that makes sense for the world we live in, and protecting people from unsafe technologies—those are all outcomes that technology can help with if we point it in the right direction.