Right now, policymakers around the world are setting their 2026 agendas on the same core questions: how to protect consumers online, how to govern AI responsibly without stifling innovation, how to strengthen privacy and security, and how to drive economic growth. From Brussels to London to Washington, across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region, and through booming tech hubs in Latin America (LATAM), Africa, and the Middle East, the policy goals often align, even when compliance requirements do not.

Having a connected global digital economy means domestic rules rarely stop at the borders of the country where they’re written. For small tech, the ripple effects are immediate: compliance can force product redesigns, delay launches, and divert limited resources from product development to lawyers’ fees. Whether unpredictable rules are tied to curated online marketplaces (COMs), overly broad age verification requirements, standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing, or weakening encryption by creating exploitable back doors, small businesses often face an environment that means less predictability for scaling, weaker investor confidence, and fewer small teams able to build and deploy tech-driven tools.

While the details of the rules and regulations vary by region, small tech’s needs are remarkably consistent. Regardless of location, our small tech members need a policy environment that rewards and inspires innovation and enables startups to access capital, hire, and scale.

Key policy priorities for 2026

  • Artificial intelligence: our members build practical AI tools, but fast-moving, inconsistent rules can turn compliance into a growth constraint that slows scale and makes investment harder to secure.
  • Competition and curated online marketplaces: curated online marketplaces help small teams reach users, but DMA-style mandates like sideloading and broad access requirements can weaken security, raise fraud risk, and create disruptive implementation churn that hits small developers first.
  • Online safety and encryption: protecting kids from privacy violations and harmful content online is the goal, but approaches that normalise identity collection or weaken end-to-end encryption increase surveillance and breach exposure, shifting liability onto smaller teams while not reliably preventing harm.
  • Market access and capital formation: small teams need cross-border market access and predictable routes to funding and liquidity; uncertainty around data flows, localisation, and merger review increases risk, tightens capital, and makes it harder for startups to scale and reinvest.
  • SEP licensing: standards power interoperability across AI and internet of things (IoT) ecosystems, but abuse of patents within standards makes pricing, planning, and access to capital harder for tech startups and independent developers.

For more details, read our region-specific small tech 2026 policy priorities in the European Union here, the United Kingdom here, and the United States here.