Safeguarding innovation from bureaucracy: The techno-libertarian pivot

The just-concluded 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) highlighted the relentless pace of technological innovation—from robotics and AI to rollable laptops and transparent TVs. Yet, amid all the excitement and glamour, a pressing question looms: how do we best safeguard innovation from government overreach? The administrative state is nothing if not ambitious.

Gary Shapiro is the long-time leader of the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the CES. As I write at Forbes, Shapiro’s new book Pivot or Die: How Leaders Thrive When Everything Changes, offers insights not just for business leaders but also for policymakers on the potential for what we might call Separation of Tech and State.

Shapiro emphasizes that a pivot is an intentional change in direction without compromising core beliefs. Pivots can be voluntary—or forced by the likes of COVID and government regulation.

The business pivots Shapiro showcases—such as Apple’s shift to mobile and Amazon’s cloud expansion—underscore how adaptability fuels success. He addresses policy pivots also, and warns of Washington’s spendthrift ways.

While the book’s emphasis is on business and technological pivots, a key policy takeaway from Pivot or Die is the wisdom of constantly rethinking the entrenched systems that can hinder technological advancement—and contemplate pivots away from them.

For starters, to protect innovation we should address four critical challenges, detailed more at Forbes:

Poorly Defined Property Rights: Regulatory agencies often keep technologies and sectors artificially separated even when synergies exist. Clarifying and enabling tradeable property rights in emerging technologies, networks, and resources can unleash competitive development.

Flawed Market Failure Narratives: Persistent beliefs in market failures and agency expertise ignore the political inefficiencies that truly obstruct progress. It’s time to correct these misconceptions, particularly since technology itself makes market failure narratives obsolete.

Outdated Antitrust Regulation: Ongoing antitrust interventions threaten dynamic tech markets and sectors. Ending these regulations is necessary to allow the advancement of large-scale capitalism, and allow non-governmental commercialization of space, development of smart cities and inter-city grids, and universalization of the Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT Overreach: Alongside the IoT’s promise, there’s a growing risk that regulators will exploit the IoT to impose click-and-swipe controls, bypassing proper legislative processes, notice-and-comment rulemaking, and even the issuance of written guidance documents.

Development of expertise in the expansion of property rights “matrices” and infrastructure from the ground up is the task of the day. This could involve (for example) testing emerging technologies in rural areas, where private land and collaborations among property owners can serve as a proving ground for concepts like VTOL air taxis, private drone “air-venues,” charging and communications hubs, and smart cities themselves. Such bottom-up approaches encourage organic growth without the drag of federal mandates and the likes of federally subsidized fields of solar panels out in the hinterland.

Agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, Energy Department, Department of Transportation, and the Federal Trade Commission inherently undermine such projects and jealously protect their turf. So long as the administrative state exists in its current incarnation, the necessary job of foundational property rights expansion cannot be performed and innovation will be sacrificed.

Shapiro warns that innovation faces political resistance, often from legacy industries clinging to outdated regulatory models. Agencies also resist change. This underscores the need for a decisive techno-libertarian policy pivot, one that rejects long-held assumptions about market failures and government expertise.

For more, see “The Techno-Libertarian Pivot: How Separation Of Tech And State Can Save Innovation,” Forbes.

And also see CEI’s book forum with Gary Shapiro on Pivot or Die.