Being a good regulator is about solving a nearly impossible satisficing problem. You have to follow the law and achieve achieve results with a limited budget and political constraints. Given the priorities of say the FTC or state AGs or the SEC, I don't think GitHub is even a blip on their radar. Of any of the regulators I would hazard to guess that maybe the California Privacy Protection Agency is the most likely to prioritize a look, but I still doubt it.

I know lots of idealists -- I went to a public policy school. And in some areas, I am one myself. We need them; they can push for their causes.

But if you ever find yourself working as a regulator, you'll find the world is complicated and messy. Regulators that overreach often make things worse for their very causes they support.

If you haven't yet, go find some regulators that have to take companies all the way to court and win. I have know some in certain fields. Learn from them. Some would probably really enjoy getting to talk to a disinterested third-party to learn the domain. There are even ways to get involved as a sort of citizen journalist if you want.

But these sort of blanket calls for "make an example of GitHub" are probably a waste of time. I think a broader view is needed here. Think about the causal chain of problems and find a link where you have leverage. Then focus your effort on that link.

I live in the DC area, where ignorance of how the government works leads to people walking away and not taking you seriously. When tech people put comparable effort into understanding the machinery of government that they do into technology, that is awesome. There are some amazing examples of this if you look around.

There are no excuses. Tech people readily accept that they have to work around the warts of their infrastructure. (We are often lucky because we get to rebuild so much software ourselves.) But we forget what it's like to work with systems that have to resist change because they are coordination points between multiple stakeholders. The conflict is by design!

Anyhow, we have no excuse to blame the warts in our governmental system. You either fix them or work around them or both.

The world is a big broken machine. Almost no individual person is to blame. You just have to understand where to turn the wrench.

GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry