Two regulators, two speeds, one problem
Victoria Shinder1 min readToday produced two stories that look unrelated and are the same story told at different tempos.
Italy's Senate voted 81 to 51 to delegate the reintroduction of nuclear power, and the bill's substance is institutional: a national programme, an independent Nuclear Safety Authority, research capacity, skills, public information. The country shut its reactors four decades ago, which means the regulator has to be assembled before anything can be licensed, and the inspectors it needs retired with the plants.
ACER's 45th REMIT Quarterly describes the opposite tempo: a supervisor already in place, with 453 breach cases under review, adapting to trading executed by programs at speeds where a manipulative pattern can exist and end without a person seeing it.
The common quantity is how long it takes an institution to become competent at the thing it is meant to supervise, measured against how fast the supervised thing moves.
Italy's gap is measured in years and is at least visible: everyone can see that a safety authority does not exist yet, and the National Programme is where that gets resourced or does not. ACER's gap is harder, because the institution does exist and its rules are unchanged - the prohibited behaviour is the same whether a person or a program placed the order. What changed is that intent must now be inferred from configuration rather than from decisions, and a caseload of 453 is the visible edge of that.
Neither problem is solved by writing new rules. Both are solved by people with operating experience, which is the input with the longest lead time and the one that appears in no budget line as such. Worth remembering when the next framework is announced as the answer.