The New York Times asked a deceptively soft question this week: is a "frictionless" society a trap? Its reporting landed on an uncomfortable answer — that eliminating whatever stands between you and a task tends to serve the company more than the person clicking the button. Sit with that through a governance lens and it sharpens into something urgent. Friction is not a defect in a system. Friction is where the system watches itself. Every approval gate, every second review, every "are you sure?" is a checkpoint — and the checkpoint was the point.
Read this week's headlines together and a pattern emerges that no single story announces: the economy is sprinting to delete friction wherever it can be monetized, and resenting it wherever a regulator dares to require it. That asymmetry is a governance problem hiding in plain sight, and it is about to get worse.
Friction is a control surface, and we're deleting it
Start with software, because that's where the future usually shows up first. SD Times, naming its 2026 honorees, said one category had broken its own label: "AI coding tool" no longer described the market because AI had become a layer of the development stack itself. That shift sounds like a maturity milestone. For governance, it's a warning. As AI systems plan changes, write code, run tests, and prepare pull requests at machine speed, the human review step — the friction — comes under pressure. The pull request a senior engineer once paused over can become a notification somebody assumes the machine already handled.
This is the mechanism worth internalizing: a control surface is just structured friction. Segregation of duties is friction. Change-approval boards are friction. Four-eyes review is friction. Strip the friction to win velocity and you have not merely sped things up — you have removed the moment where a human being could still say no.
The default path is never neutral
Here's why "frictionless" deserves suspicion rather than applause. The frictionless path is always a designed path, and whoever designs it captures the value. Europe's top court just upheld a €4.1 billion Android antitrust fine, confirming a European Commission case that began in 2018. The violation was not that Android existed, or even that it was popular. It was that Google used Android's dominance to require manufacturers to pre-install Google Search, Chrome, and Google Play, and to prevent rival Android systems from taking the smoothest route to the user. Google argued that the judgment failed to recognize its investment in keeping Android open, interoperable, and free. But the antitrust logic is really a governance insight in disguise: a default is a decision made on your behalf by someone with an interest in the outcome. Frictionless never means neutral. It means somebody else already chose.
Governance professionals should treat every "streamlined," "one-click," and "auto-approved" workflow the same way — not as a convenience, but as a decision someone pre-made and then hid inside the plumbing.
The tell: mandated friction is "unbearable"
Now watch what happens when friction runs the other direction. The head of Berlin's airport warned that queues under the EU's new Entry-Exit System will be "not bearable" over the summer. The system, fully operational since April 10, 2026, records names, travel-document data, fingerprints, facial images, and entry and exit details for non-EU short-stay travelers. It exists for security and border-integrity reasons — friction deliberately introduced to enforce a rule. And the reaction, predictably, is that it's intolerable.
That is the asymmetry laid bare. Friction removed for profit gets called innovation. Friction added for compliance gets called bureaucracy. The same organizations that celebrate deleting a checkout step will describe a mandatory approval as a productivity tax. Governance almost always lives on the resented side of that line, which means the burden of proof is permanently on the people asking for a pause. If you run controls for a living, you are not fighting a fair fight — you are defending the least popular word in the building.
The smartest move in the room: price the friction
The most interesting response to this problem this week came from the Justice Department. Its National Security Division issued its first declination under the department-wide Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy, paired with a parallel Bureau of Industry and Security civil settlement. Translated: Robert Bosch GmbH voluntarily disclosed potential export-control violations, cooperated, remediated, agreed to disgorge about $11.4 million, and paid a parallel BIS penalty of about $36.2 million — but avoided criminal prosecution.
Look at what that structure actually does. It prices friction. It does not pretend self-reporting is free; Bosch still paid real money. But it makes the friction a company imposes on itself — investigate, self-report, remediate — legibly valuable compared with waiting for the state to find the problem first. That is a far more sophisticated tool than a mandate. It doesn't order anyone to slow down; it makes slowing down at the right moment the rational choice.
The sustainability world is converging on the same trick from a different direction. As Trellis argued this week, ESG is increasingly being viewed through risk and opportunity rather than as a standalone compliance exercise — a lens that can become a competitive advantage when it is integrated into business strategy. That reframe is not spin. It is the pricing of friction: making the checkpoint feel like value creation instead of cost.
The lesson for governance leaders is direct:
- Friction framed as a rule invites evasion.
- Friction framed as a price invites calculation — and calculation usually favors the checkpoint when the stakes are made visible.
Spend your friction where it can't be added later
If friction is a resource, it has to be budgeted, not sprinkled evenly. And the clearest guide to where it belongs is irreversibility.
Consider the roomful of rivals who gathered, per Trellis, to define what a genuinely sustainable data center would require — against the backdrop of what Trellis described as a trillion-dollar AI infrastructure wave that will lock these facilities in for decades. You cannot retrofit a checkpoint into poured concrete. The friction of getting the standard right has to be spent now, before the choices harden, because after that the decision is simply gone. High-stakes, hard-to-reverse decisions deserve maximum friction. Low-stakes, easily undone ones deserve almost none.
There is a quieter cost to over-deleting friction, too. The New York Times noted this week that AI's effect on the economy is unusually hard to measure in real time: labor-market, productivity, firm-level, and task-level data do not all point cleanly in one direction. For governance leaders, the lesson is narrower but important. If automation removes checkpoints without replacing them with audit trails, you lose decision telemetry. Friction doesn't only enforce; it documents. Every checkpoint can leave a trail. Delete enough of them and you lose not just control, but the ability to know what you lost.
The takeaway: build a friction budget
The instinct to eliminate friction is not wrong — most organizations carry checkpoints that guard nothing and cost plenty. But "reduce friction" is not a strategy. It's an abdication dressed as efficiency.
The governance discipline for the next few years is deliberate friction allocation: strip it ruthlessly from the reversible and the low-stakes, concentrate it around the irreversible and the consequential, and — following the DOJ's lead — price it so that the people you govern choose the checkpoint rather than resent it. The frictionless default will get designed either way. The only question is whether you're the one designing it, or the one it's being designed around.
Sources
- National Security Division Announces First Declination Under the Department-wide Corporate Enforcement Policy — U.S. Department of Justice
- Intelligence-Augmented Development: How AI Became Infrastructure, Not a Feature SD Times 100 — SD Times
- Top EU court dismisses Google appeal of $4.5 billion antitrust fine — Associated Press
- Google loses fight against record €4.1 billion EU antitrust fine — Reuters via WTVB
- Entry/Exit System (EES) — European Commission
- EU border delays 'not bearable' over summer, warns airport boss — BBC Business
- What would it take to build a sustainable data center? A roomful of rivals tried to find out — Trellis (fka GreenBiz)
- Want to succeed in sustainability? Learn to manage risk — Trellis (fka GreenBiz)
- A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How. — NYT Business
- Is a ‘Frictionless’ Society a Trap? — NYT Technology