Science & Tech Quote by Jim Barksdale

Libertarian simplicity is doing a lot of work here. When Jim Barksdale says, "I don't believe in government regulation of the software industry", he isn’t just airing a preference; he’s advancing a power-friendly story about how the digital economy should be governed: by the people who build it, fund it, and profit from it.

The phrasing matters. "I don't believe" frames regulation as a matter of faith rather than evidence, shifting the debate away from measurable harms (privacy violations, monopolistic lock-in, security failures) and toward ideology. It also smuggles in a flattering myth of software as uniquely self-correcting: bugs get patched, markets punish bad products, innovation thrives when left alone. In the 1990s-era tech boom Barksdale helped define (notably at Netscape), that myth wasn’t just optimistic; it was a business strategy. Faster iteration and first-mover advantage were the competitive edge, and regulation threatened to slow the loop.

The subtext is less "government is incompetent" than "government is too blunt an instrument for this kind of velocity". But the consequence of that framing is convenient: it treats software as neutral infrastructure instead of as a sector that sets rules for speech, commerce, work, and surveillance. "The software industry" also sounds tidy, when the real world is messy: code runs hospitals, elections, banking systems, and critical security. Regulation isn’t only about stifling innovation; it’s about assigning accountability when the costs of failure fall on everyone else.

Barksdale’s line captures a defining bargain of the early internet: public permission for private experimentation, with oversight promised later. The fight, decades on, is that "later" keeps getting rescheduled.