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Schneier: We Need a Better Way of Regulating New Technologies (schneier.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, when a Brazilian judge shut down WhatsApp, it affected roughly half of the country's ~200 million residents. It's not the first time — or the second, or the third — that WhatsApp has faced legal pressure, and Bruce Schneier says it's clear evidence of a "massive power struggle" between internet companies and traditional companies. Central to this struggle is the inability of our lawmakers to quickly and effectively regulate new technologies. He says, "Traditionally, new technologies were adopted slowly over decades. There was time for people to figure them out, and for their social repercussions to percolate through society. Legislatures and courts had time to figure out rules for these technologies and how they should integrate into the existing legal structures. ... This isn't a simple matter of needing government to get out of the way and let companies battle in the marketplace. ... We need a better way of regulating new technologies. That's going to require bridging the gap between technologists and policymakers. Each needs to understand the other — not enough to be experts in each other's fields but enough to engage in meaningful conversations and debates. That's also going to require laws that are agile and written to be as technologically invariant as possible."
That's a bit disingenuous. The motto of the "disruption" crowd is explicitly 'better to have your lawyers fight for dismissal than ask for permission', particularly when it comes to the structure of laws and regulations that have been put in place to protect the general population from damage and exploitation. How about a commitment by the technology-pushers to obey the law to start with?
sPh
Or too experienced to be seduced by the shiny new new thing without some measured consideration. Your viewpoint may vary.
sPh
...it's a feature.
Let the market decide, and let regulation catch up later (if ever).
We don't need "better" ways to regulate new technologies, we need smaller government that doesn't feel the need to stick its tentacles into every orifice of the body politic.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
While it is true that youth tends to latch on to what is touted as new and shiny whether it really is new, and really is valuable, or not....
The greater problem is that politicians, specifically, are not technicians and are very isolated from mainstream culture. Technologies which are shaping the culture of millions upon millions of people are completely new and foreign to them, and they don't have the time they need to really get their heads around the tech and what it means.
The recurring theme of needing encryption back doors is a good example. Those in power only see it as "they are keeping secrets from us!" They don't understand the technical landscape enough to realize how their back doors will ruin a foundational element of the emerging digital economy, to the severe detriment of everyone involved. They don't understand this because they didn't grow up with it, don't have the natural technical interest in learning about it, and don't have the time they need to gain a proper understanding. They demand that their aids give them an executive summary (which gives them an incomplete picture) and they run with their instincts (which were honed in a world that lacked these technologies).
That problem on their part overpowers the "shiny new is good" problem on the part of the youth.
Do I hear
We Need a Better Way to Protect Established Players and Corrupt Governments
?
Letter To Iran
Most of the people who are in power and makes laws are too old to even begin to comprehend how things work and how much they are a part of modern society.
Oh, FFS, stop blaming it on age. You want to argue it's because they are politicans, not techies? Sure, I'll buy that. Or that they haven't bothered to learn new things and keep up with changes to the world? Sure, I can buy that too. But age itself?
I am in my early 60's, at least as old as the average politician. Am i "too old to comprehend how things work"? I've designed parts of modern CPUs, and written C++ compiler optimizations targeted to them. I was on arpanet in 1981, and I wrote my first assembly language program in the late 1960's on a computer that filled a room and whose user interface had moving parts which could physically injure the careless.
You blame age, but I see young people cheerfully giving up every shred of their communications to companies like Facebook and Google. I see them preferring curated computing over free computing so that the former succeeds in the marketplace and the latter is dying out. I see them having NO awareness of whether their data is held on their own device or transmitted to a hundred unknown companies. I see them being increasingly unable to use computing systems with UIs more complex than I see as appropriate for grade-school children. I see them manually repeating trivial actions a hundred times in a row because they lack any ability to automate the task with a device invented to automate tasks. I see blank looks if I ask them to copy this file to that directory, because a grid of canned icons to launch the Facebook app and "like" selfies is the only way they are able to interact with a computer.
"Digital natives", my senile geezer ass.
My generation has legions and legions of technically clueless people, I will grant that. So does every generation. But the so-called digital natives are not exactly shining examples of wise decision making, taken as an entire group. I'm just along for the ride at this point, watching in abject horror.
Please, give the ageism a break.
Lawn. You know what to do.
I second all this and would also add that this attitude has much worse repercussions than just to insult parent poster's "senile geezer ass." It also lulls people into a sense of complacency, with the thought that once the old guys retire and new blood gets in everything will be all better. That is certainly not true. For example, as pp points out, the Facebook generation isn't going to fight for open and interchangeable standards, since they hardly even know what those are. And one of my favorite /. sigs is the Woz quote about the cloud that ownership is what made America different than the USSR during the cold war.
Dumb 'pipes' (routers) with any application you can think of and build at the edges (hosts).
And yet the typical user uses it mainly for Netflix and Facebook on their iPhone. So while "permissionless innovation" is one model that the internet supports, it also supports the "government enforced copyright monopoly" model and the "ask permission from big corporations" model. There is an old saying that democracies like capitalism, but capitalism doesn't necessarily like democracy. The relationship between the internet and corporations is somewhat similar.