> And while it's easy to dismiss policy makers as doing it wrong, it's important to understand that they're not.
Except when they are, which is more often than not.
Creating good policies around anything is hard. It has taken centuries to fine tune the laws for things like physical theft and contracts and acts of violence, and even then examples of unjust outcomes are easy to find.
Using a process that takes a decade to modify rules for a system that changes every year is pretty hopeless. The rules are already stale by the time they're enacted and any mistake takes generations to fix.
More to the point, most of the "tech problems" are not novel. Essentially 100% of the legitimate "bad stuff" that the CFAA prohibits was already illegal under existing laws that have nothing specifically to do with computers. But because of the way it was drafted, it's so broad and ambiguous and draconian that it also imposes severe penalties on a wide variety of largely innocuous behavior. And so it is with the unintended consequences from DMCA anti-circumvention, the unintended consequences from SESTA, on and on.
Doing this well is hard. Most attempts have not succeeded. And doing it wrong is worse than not doing it at all. It's not as if the only alternative to SESTA was for sex trafficking to be legal -- the alternative would have just been the status quo ante. Which was better than SESTA.
Policy doesn't work that way; it's specifically focused on use. It focuses on people and what they do. Policy makers can't create policy around a piece of technology without understanding how it is used -- how all of it's used
This is an important point. It's the point pg misses in http://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html where he expresses certainty that if you're opposed to software patents, then you're opposed to software in general, since there's a technological equivalence between software and hardware. What's different, though, is the way people come up with new stuff. A more correct statement would be, if you're opposed to software patents, you're opposed to patents on things where people use a process much like software development when they create new stuff.
A very central difference that the OP misses: Technologists generally accept that technologies are tools that can be used for good, and less good, or even evil. Many policy makers (especially in the EU) seem to think that policy can somehow reserve the benefits of technological progress for uses they deem positive for society.
Except when they are, which is more often than not.
Creating good policies around anything is hard. It has taken centuries to fine tune the laws for things like physical theft and contracts and acts of violence, and even then examples of unjust outcomes are easy to find.
Using a process that takes a decade to modify rules for a system that changes every year is pretty hopeless. The rules are already stale by the time they're enacted and any mistake takes generations to fix.
More to the point, most of the "tech problems" are not novel. Essentially 100% of the legitimate "bad stuff" that the CFAA prohibits was already illegal under existing laws that have nothing specifically to do with computers. But because of the way it was drafted, it's so broad and ambiguous and draconian that it also imposes severe penalties on a wide variety of largely innocuous behavior. And so it is with the unintended consequences from DMCA anti-circumvention, the unintended consequences from SESTA, on and on.
Doing this well is hard. Most attempts have not succeeded. And doing it wrong is worse than not doing it at all. It's not as if the only alternative to SESTA was for sex trafficking to be legal -- the alternative would have just been the status quo ante. Which was better than SESTA.
This is an important point. It's the point pg misses in http://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html where he expresses certainty that if you're opposed to software patents, then you're opposed to software in general, since there's a technological equivalence between software and hardware. What's different, though, is the way people come up with new stuff. A more correct statement would be, if you're opposed to software patents, you're opposed to patents on things where people use a process much like software development when they create new stuff.
There's only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things... everything else is Policy.
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