Available at SSRN.
Abstract: Regulation is imposed on regulatory objects: persons, firms, transactions, products, services, infrastructures, duties, relationships and prohibited acts to which obligations and liabilities can attach. This paper argues that general-purpose computation creates a distinctive problem of regulatory-object construction and a hard limit on object-specific regulation of computable capabilities. Because computable capabilities can be copied, modified, self-hosted, forked and reimplemented across general-purpose infrastructure, the same regulated function can move between regulatory objects. The paper develops a predictive theory of regulatory-object stability: the regulable substrate of any activity is its non-computable fraction. For activities expressible in computational form, targeting the non-substitutable substrate is impossible without being overbroad.