As we close 2025, we look back on a turbulent and exciting year in tech policy. Wins for regular Americans in the digital public square were tempered by Europe’s aggressive crackdown on innovative American companies.

Check out the five best and worst policies in tech in 2025:

Best Tech Policies:

  1. Artificial Intelligence policy takes center stage: The Trump administration has made American leadership in the artificial intelligence (AI) development and adoption race a top priority. In advocating for a lighter-touch regulatory approach, the administration has revoked heavy-handed Biden-era policies and pushed for AI in classrooms. Working with Congress, conservatives are also reining in state laws.
  2. Sandboxes for technology: Technology can develop and thrive when innovation is allowed to flourish without overly restrictive laws. The federal government is following states in adopting a regulatory sandbox approach for federal law, providing innovators with a safe place to create products and get consumer feedback. In exchange for the freedom from some regulatory risk, they gain specialized regulatory oversight. Healthcare technology is a great example of how this can work well to build products that save lives.
  3. Spectrum sales: Tucked into the One, Big Beautiful Bill was a green light for the federal government to sell electromagnetic spectrum. These are the airwaves that enable us to communicate anywhere and at any time. From mobile phones to GPS and TV broadcasting to radar, our telecommunications infrastructure is built on spectrum. The money from spectrum auctions will be used to pay down the deficit. Meanwhile, freeing more spectrum from government hands to the private sector will power 5G and 6G technology expansion. Our cell phones can’t wait.
  4. Big tech embraces free speech: The days of shadow banning, complete bans, demonitization, biased third-party factchecking, and other forms of censorship are quickly disappearing from the public digital square. Prominent conservatives and contrarian views on Covid-19 and climate change can once again spread their messages with far less disruption. Big Tech companies have come clean about their censorship efforts, often driven by government pressure, and are turning the page on the dark ages of heavy censorship.
  5. Greater parental controls: At Independent Women, we’ve always held that parents are the front line and most critical force for moderating social media and AI content for their children. Increasingly, platforms and apps are providing parents with more tools to do so. This is one way to protect kids from harmful content (that’s legal, but may not be appropriate) and to stave off aggressive regulation from lawmakers, which could have negative unintended consequences.

Worst Tech Policies:

  1. Pressuring Big Tech to censor speech: While government pressure on Big Tech to censor speech is receding in the U.S., it’s not gone. Residual ad policies and other vestiges of the past few years still linger, making it challenging for policy organizations and even campaigns to promote their content without jumping through great hoops. Those policies have hobbled their ability to reach more citizens with ideas and policy solutions to the detriment of communities and our nation. 
  2. Europe’s speech police claimed their first scalp: The European Union (EU) is flexing its muscle against (American) social media companies. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) proposes to set the rules for online platforms to address illegal content, protect users, and increase transparency and content moderation. X, formerly Twitter, was slapped with a hefty fine recently, in an effort to force the platform to crack down on speech Europeans dislike. The Trump administration is primed to enter the fray.
  3. Europe aims to hobble American businesses: Some 80% of the world’s largest 25 companies are based in the United States. Instead of mimicking the pro-growth policies that empower business formation and growth for European businesses, the EU is on a path to hamper big American businesses. Through the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU is ramping up regulation of the business practices of big companies, which conveniently are mostly big American companies, to the detriment of consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. 
  4. Feds push ahead with cases to break up Big Tech: Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon all face antitrust cases. Both the Google and Meta cases are in their final phases. Positively, a federal judge refused to break up Google over its leadership in the online search space. Meta also defeated an antitrust case over its acquisition of Instagram. Still, Apple and Amazon face trial dates as they seek to defend against charges that they’ve become dominant forces by engaging in practices that harm consumers, even if consumers enjoy a wider variety of goods and services at better prices.
  1. Social media bans spread: We are all for banning cell phones in the classroom, but state-level social media bans for children impose costs that policymakers may not consider. From mandatory age verification systems to outright prohibitions, laws and lawsuits over the laws picked up steam this year. At the end of the day, shouldn’t parents make the decision about social media adoption for their own children?

These are far from the only policies that impacted the tech world. Lawsuits against Big Tech companies from federal and state governments, as well as individuals, grabbed headlines.

The most jarring and emotion-filled were parents who sued social media companies over the heartbreaking loss of their children or deterioration in their children’s health. As AI adoption widens, we’re seeing cases of children who commit suicide or self-harm because of interactions with chatbots. The calls for regulation are percolating and will only widen as more cases arise.

Technology—from social media to e-commerce to AI—is in varying states of development and faces different regulatory challenges. Whereas AI is still in the Wild West phase, e-commerce is cemented as a mainstay in society by earning the admiration and appreciation of most Americans. 

Decades before there was an information super highway, policymakers decided to adopt a light regulatory touch. The outcome has been civilizational transformation, led by American ingenuity. That dominance makes us the envy of the world, and other countries are now trying to rein in American technology. At the same time, tech companies face regulatory challenges from the Left and the Right for very different reasons.

Bottom Line

A light regulatory approach freed innovators to build the world’s biggest companies that deliver immense value—wealth, freedom, connectivity, social power, etc.—to every society. Departing from this approach by increasing government authority may provide people with a greater sense of control, protecting the blessings of innovation, but entirely avoiding its curses. But that’s a false sense that may become clearer as time unfolds.