Science & Tech Quote by Michael Oxley

“Certainly” is doing a lot of political work here: it signals consensus before anyone has even raised a question. Michael Oxley isn’t making a daring claim; he’s staking out safe ground, the kind legislators use to sound informed while keeping options open. The line reads like a throat-clearing preamble to regulation, oversight hearings, or industry-friendly reform: technology happened, it changed everything, now we must respond (the “we” left conveniently undefined).

The phrase “advent of technology” is deliberately hazy. It bundles together the internet, data analytics, listing platforms, online mortgage origination, automated underwriting, digital signatures, even the early tremors of algorithmic pricing. By pairing it with “electronic commerce,” Oxley narrows the focus to transactions and markets, not gadgets. The subtext is about money moving faster, more remotely, and with less friction - and about the resulting stress on the old gatekeepers of real estate: brokers, lenders, county recorders, and regulators.

The context matters: Oxley’s career sits in the late-90s/early-2000s Washington era when policymakers were juggling dot-com optimism with rising anxiety about consumer protection and market integrity. In real estate, “immense impact” can be read as both promise and warning: broader access and efficiency on one hand; fraud, opacity, and uneven power dynamics on the other. It’s a quote that sounds bland until you hear its real message: the industry’s rules were written for paper, offices, and local knowledge - and the internet doesn’t respect any of that.