US Law Can't Keep Up With Technology -- and Why That's a Good Thing (newsweek.com)

HughPickens.com writes: In the 1910s, the number of cars in the US exploded from 200,000 to 2.5 million. The newfangled machines scared horses and ran over pedestrians, but by the time government could pass the very first traffic law, it was too late to stop them. Now Kevin Matley writes in Newsweek that thanks to political gridlock in the US, lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. New technologies spread almost instantly and take hold with almost no legal oversight. According to Matley, this is terrific for tech startups, especially those aimed at demolishing creaky old norms—like taxis, or flight paths over crowded airspace, or money. "Drone aircraft are suddenly filling the sky, and a whole multibillion-dollar industry of drone making and drone services has taken hold," says Matley. "If the FAA had been either farsighted or fast moving, at the first sign of drones it might've outlawed them or confined them to someplace like Oklahoma where they can't get in the way of anything too important. But now the FAA is forced to accommodate drones, not the other way around." Bitcoin is another example of a technology that's too late to stop. "But have you heard the word bitcoin uttered once in any of the presidential debates? Government doesn't even understand bitcoin, and that's been really good for it." Uber and Airbnb show how to execute this outrun-the-government strategy. By the time cities understood what those companies were doing, it was too late to block or seriously limit them.

Comments

Re:Rest of the world chimes in.

[Sique]

Many people who hail the gold standard ignore a simple fact: A gold standard for coins means constant deflation, which is bad in most economic situation, because it gives incentives for hoarding money instead of spending it. Or for the technically inclined: Gold coins don't scale. Each year, the world economy grows about 4%, but the amount of gold available doesn't. Thus with time, with the gold standard a fixed amount of gold represents more and more actual value. A precious metal standard was kinda okeish, as long as you could set aside some productivity gains to mine more precious metals to represent the gained productivity in additional coins. It worked as long as countries in dire need of more precious metals simply invaded other countries and either stole theirs or started to mine non-depleted resources.

But somehow, conquering other nations and plundering their wealth just for your own coin mints has been frowned upon recently, and thus the gold standard had to be abandoned, as the gold available couldn't scale anymore with the gold needed for minting.

The devil is in the details

[sjbe]

Why should laws keep up with technology? Laws should be written in such a way that the technology involved doesn't matter.

Kind of adorable that you think that is possible. Oh you can put a general framework out there but there ALWAYS are going to be specific details that need legislation. Congress in the 1700s could not possible have written a law that deals adequately with the nuances of radio communications 200 years later. Nobody is so smart as to be able to write laws in such a way that technology doesn't matter. Furthermore any law that is so broad as to cover everything will have innumerable corner case, loopholes and problems. You need a good framework but sooner or later you are going to have to get into the ugly specifics.

How Government Regulation Works

[retroworks]

1. Tinkerer invents something.

2. Regulator goes to office, gets cup of coffee, reads the paper, doesn't care.

3. "Wild West" economy as millions buy and use invention.

4. Regulator goes to lunch.

5. Nine Journalists report on invention as wonderful, spectacular, world-changing.

6. Regulator does some shopping on way back from lunch.

7. Tenth journalist, beaten to punch, finds "man bites dog" story, unintended consequence of invention

8. Regulator packs briefcase for ride home.

9. Legislators get panicked calls from people either hurt by invention, or afraid they'll be hurt by invention.

10. Regulator has dinner, goes to bed.

Guess what regulator reads in the paper tomorrow morning? Guess what's in the regulator's email tomorrow morning?

As a former regulator, there's nothing sinister about either the cowboy market or the regulations, and I get weary of the memes of anti-cowboy and anti-sheriff. What is broken is risk-benefit analysis, and it's probably broken at the journalism juncture. "if it bleeds, it leads" gives journalists money if they shock us, and there's nothing more shocking than a new risk we have to worry about.