I don’t think it is fair to criticize the person you are responding to for asking the question they did.

These types of comments are common on this site because we are actually interested in how things work in practice. We don’t like to stop at just saying “companies shouldn’t be allowed to do problematic research without approval”, we like to think about how you could ever make that idea a reality.

If we are serious about stopping problematic corporate research, we have to ask these questions. To regulate something, you have to be able to define it. What sort of research are we trying to regulate? The person you replied to gave a few examples of things that are clearly ‘research’ and probably aren’t things we would want to prevent, so if we are serious about regulating this we would need a definition that includes the bad stuff but doesn’t include the stuff we don’t want to regulate.

If we don’t ask these questions, we can never move past hand wringing.