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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."
The reach of technology is, in most cases, world-wide. Do you expect people to be able to abide with all the rules and laws of all the countries on the planet? What's legal and morally accepted in one country is totally immoral and unlawful in another.
Probably because you can never have nice things if you always had to ask before you made them. Imagine if Sony had to ask permission to create betamax, I guarantee you that the government would have said "Oh, copyright infringement tool. Nope."
Most of the time, perceived risks (or rather, doom and gloom dystopias) never materialize.
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.
Even as a pretty adamant liberal I recognize that a lot of lawmaking is the result of regulatory capture. Whenever a large commercial entity sits in an entrenched potion and siphons up money because regulations raise barriers to entry, we have a problem. Progress stagnates. Money gets wasted.
Disruptive businesses have a place. Sure they may skirt the law in new and interesting ways but they force industries to churn and change. The courts eventually settle matters. Luckily, law-making is an old institution that runs at a slow pace so disruption happens before regulatory capture can take hold.
Ride-share is a perfect example. Yes, Uber is obviously exploiting worker law loopholes and are likely exploiting their employees. Yes, they're skirting taxi law that's necessary to protect riders.
But on the flip side taxi institutions are some of the most abusive and exploitative examples of corrupt regulatory capture one could imagine. As a customer you pay way too fucking much for shitty service. Taxi drivers get shitty compensation for their work, face stifling fees, and work for companies that have obvious corrupt ties to local authorities that locked out competition.
The taxi institution NEEDED to be shakes down and broken. Mobile internet opened up a new type of service better than traditional taxi. On the upside the genie is out of the bottle. The public loves it. Uber likely won't go away now.
When the dust settles we'll likely see employment protection for Uber/lyft/whatever drivers, better service for customers, re-born taxi institutions forced to update in order to compete. Everyone will win, except the people who wanted to maintain the (awful) status quo.
See also: The hotel industry and the new internet-enabled room sharing services turning it upside down.
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.
An awful lot of 'regulation of technology' is really the State 'regulating its citizens' - that is, by an attempt to restrict good encryption, or encryption without backdoors. Ask yourself if you trust the same people who are spying on your every communication.
Uber also routinely breaks numerous law put in place to protect consumers and citizens, often as a result of hard-won experience. Not sure what the legal or moral justification for that is, other than "I wanna".
sPh