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

Posted by timothy on from the law-that-anticipates-also-oversteps dept.

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.

4 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Why should they? by Monoman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why should laws keep up with technology? Laws should be written in such a way that the technology involved doesn't matter. Typically laws should be about an outcome more than a method. There are already so many laws on the books that the first thing to look at is if an existing law applies. If not, is there a law that should be amended to cover the new technology?

    Example: Highway speed limits are for all motor vehicles and not just a specific type of vehicle. It does not matter how many wheels (car, motorcycle, tractor trailer, etc) the car has, what type of the engine (gas, diesel, electric) is under the hood, what kind of transmission (auto, manual), or if if has some fancy new electronic accessory ... the speed limit is the speed limit.

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    1. Re: Why should they? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Obviously you're a Green. Their default response to anything new is to react in the same reflexive the way mainline churches do to changes in social mores.

      Technology IS people, dumbass. We do science because we are curious about that is going on in the natural world, and then whenever the science uncovers something we can apply to making our lives easier, someone will try it.

      In your full-employment economy, there are a certain number of people whose job it is to break up one-ton rocks into pieces small enough to haul away from a construction site so a house can be built. It takes you a week to bust and haul each rock. When some engineer invents a machine to do this job, your role in life is not to crawl off in a corner and die. It's to learn how to operate the machine. When the machine for hauling away one-ton rocks gets scaled up to haul away ten- and one-hundred ton rocks, you can be part of the team that builds high-rises, not just houses. Then you're working on the Panama Canal.

  2. Invisible Hands and things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Once again this drivel from a worshipper of The Church of Invisible Hands and Shrugging Atlases.

    I do agree that laws are not always for the best. But there ends our agreement. The worst laws are those bought by "whole multibillion-dollar industr[ies]". The shrugging (should I say bribing?) Atlases.

  3. Re:Rest of the world chimes in. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you think the NSA doesn't have a virgin leather-bound, gold-leafed folio with hexadecimal printout of every single possible bitcoin inside, I have an ethernet bridge to sell you... On the other hand, we can only theorize why they don't just dump all possible bitcoins on the net, thereby instantly annulling its value.

    Someone doesn't understand how bitcoin works.