There is now a growing consensus for the need for more regulation of the digital economy – the tech giants in particular. All gloriously unspecific about what exactly these regulations will be.

A vocal lobby out there says we have been asleep at the wheel and we need to act fast to make up for past mistakes before its too late. To borrow the famous Zuckerberg phrase, regulators should “move fast and break things” – not wait around years to carefully contemplate appropriate regulatory interventions. The time is now! Vive la regulatory revolution!

George Bernard Shaw (pictured) said “Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder”.  Moving fast and breaking things is precisely what I worry about. Well meaning regulators, acting fast, have a history of knackering markets. Ofgem, in 2009, responded to the clamour about exploitative pricing by energy companies in their home turf (versus the attractive tariffs they offered to pull customers away from their rivals elsewhere) by banning geographic price discrimination. King regulator the CMA, after the longer more deliberative process of a two year market investigation, decided in 2015 that Ofgem had been utterly stupid to do it (I paraphrase somewhat) and had killed retail competition.

What unnerves me about the current debate around digital regulation is not the call for more regulation. Even the tech firms themselves accept the need for some of that. It is the patrician nature of the debate – the confidence with which people speak about reshaping markets for the benefit of consumers. Some humility please – you basically have no idea how to regulate this sector well, and it will take a long time to work out what to do. Anyone who pretends they do, or advocates moving fast and breaking things, is not taking seriously enough the huge and lasting damage that regulatory mistakes can cause.

Let’s have a serious debate about the risks of regulating badly, and how any new regulatory regime can be designed to mitigate them. And let’s take our time: after all “no-one who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect” (another Bernard Shaw quote).