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

Why should they?

[Monoman]

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.

Re:Why should they?

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, you raise a good point. Recently the California Coastal Commission enacted a regulation banning the breeding of orcas at Sea World. The mission of the California Coastal Commission is "To protect, conserve, restore, and enhance the environment of the California coastline". What does Sea World breeding orcas have to do with that mission?

The Commission's justification for this regulation was that no one else was regulating Sea World in this area, so they were free to do so. Notice, they did not point to a law which gave them the authority to regulate Sea World. They just assumed that such regulation was appropriate and, since no other government agency was doing so, enacted a regulation.

This is NOT how our government is supposed to work.

Re: Why should they?

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:Bitcoin isn't the best example.

[Richard_at_work]

None of the examples are particularly good:

Bitcoin - lots of investigation from the SEC et al, rules laid out and restrictions put in place.

Uber - don't we pretty much have at least one story a week about Uber being banned in particular locations after failing to follow requirements for taxi services already in place?

AirBnB - massive legal issues, banned in NYC for a time, required to implement hotel taxes.

I don't think any of the examples are actually examples of things outrunning the government successfully.

Since when does America attack her tinkerers?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

So what is the assertion here- the government will stop technology as soon as it gets a whiff of what's going on? Are you sure you're not mixing up the government with your parents?

The government has no interest in stopping the forward movement of technology, nor do they have a historical record of trying to do so. The idea that they *might have* stopped the automobile or drones or bitcoin is just that, an idea you have for some reason. It's a historical counterfactual injected to frame the government as technologically regressive.

I see no evidence that the government is ideologically technologically regressive. If your point is that politicians think the internet is a like a bunch of old fashonied vacuum tubes through which messages get sent (which actually is not a terrible analogy) then consider that about as many older movie stars and writers and artists don't use or *get* modern technology as politicians, who skew heavily upwards in age.

Just recalling instances from one day's reading and listening Richard Gere isn't on Twitter and Richard Ford writes his novels longhand without a computer. So it goes.

OTOH we fund via DARPA and other programs vast amounts of the most cutting edge science, science which if it were declassified would seem like magic to us. We're talking advances in things like human cloning and quantum computers which are mind blowing even to readers of /.

So where is this "good thing they didn't know about THIS" attitude coming from? America celebrates it's inventors, tinkerers, mavericks, oddballs. All these things you cite are products of tinkering. They're not basic science but the application of well known technologies to solve problems in novel ways.

Say what you want about America, pre-emptive legislation is not in American's DNA. If something becomes big enough to start impacting innocent bystanders, broadly considered, then Congress steps in, as is its right and duty.

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.