There was a cracking episode of the Regulate.tech podcast published last week. If you weren’t aware of the podcast, it’s an insider’s view of how the tech policy sausage gets made, by someone who has made it on both sides of the table, that being Richard Allan (currently of the House of Lords, formerly of FB), ably assisted by Nicklas Lundblad of various works.

(Disclaimer: Richard and I have crossed paths a few times, and I have always found him to be a lovely chap who fights the good fights. Search for “regulate tech” in your podcast app of choice. I’ve moved to Overcast, and highly recommend it.)

What bemused me is that the episode is a subtweet about the events of recent weeks, as well as the personalities at their centres, without really mentioning those events or people. (That’s advanced professional sausage making skills, you know.)

In the episode, they talked about redlines. That means the point where a company’s government relations function disagrees with a government request, and how they proceed from there. It all depends, of course, on which side is approaching the other in good faith and which is approaching in bad faith – and believe me, that balance swaps from issue to issue. That segued into a rough taxonomy of the three kinds of relationships that government affairs teams tend to have with policymakers.

I listened with a smile, though, because I can definitely think of a fourth kind. Been there, done that, don’t even have a t-shirt to show for it.

I’m going to expand on that, but …  first, I’m curious to see if anyone else caught that too. Perhaps you caught it from your personal experience, or perhaps you caught it observing recent events.

Leave a comment if you did, and we’ll come back to this next week.