The communications business is severely regimented by government regulators because of the dominant role played by a few large companies and because of a tradition of heavy state investment. The regulations can limit the rate at which new technology is introduced and they often restrain the innovative service provider until his competitors can offer a similar service, thus interfering with the introduction of imaginative new products.
Governments often resort to the regulation of product lines and prices as well as technology.
For instance, allegedly so that governments can access data that might relate to the activities of terrorists or of organized criminals, there have been suggestions from officials that the use of cryptography should be limited to encryption that would be readable by official codebreakers. Because of the rate of invention of new and desirable technology, the industry is prone to minimize risk by building new products to agreed industry standards. These standards are often conceived before a new product leaves the research and development stage, after it has been shown that a market exists for the product. The standards may smother competitive distinctions between different manufacturer's products. They may act to deprive the customer of an effective choice of product or service.