Regulating services that have serious repocussions, if the service were to fail, are prime candidates to be regulated. Who wants to fly in an aeroplane owned by an airline who doesn't give a crap about maintaining their aircraft? No one. You can't wait for the service to fail spectacularly, and cause a lot of grief, to educate the public about which services are okay and which are dangerous. You need a preemptive agency that will find these substandard services before they fail.
If people buy a buggy piece of software for your home PC and it fails, it won't cause as much grief as if a plane, for example, falls out of the sky. You can quite easily distinguish which services need to be regulated and which do not by how much grief they will cause the public if they fail.
Commerce systems are in the league of services that need to be regulated. If a commerce system fails and people get hold of sensitive information, the repocussions are serious.
It makes sense that the regulating body should be a government agency. A government agency (one would hope anyways) would be less succeptible to hidden agendas and corruption than a for profit organisation.
A rifle is more dangerous because it makes mass murder much easier.
Sure, a knife or an iron bar will kill a person as will a rifle; but running around with an iron bar killing a group of people is much harder than sitting on a rooftop taking pot shots at people with a rifle.
I agree that people mature at different rates, but you still need some measure of a person's maturity. If you are not going to judge someone's maturity by their age, what other yardstick are you going to use?
Do you make people take a "maturity test" and if they pass give them a maturity card to carry in their wallets?
It's not perfect, but a person's age is the best measure of maturity I can think of. Any other form of measuring a person's maturity becomes a pain in the ass to administer.
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There's an agreement? By whom? If you are going to say there's an agreement, to enforce your point, you should also say who you are referring to.
Regulating services that have serious repocussions, if the service were to fail, are prime candidates to be regulated. Who wants to fly in an aeroplane owned by an airline who doesn't give a crap about maintaining their aircraft? No one. You can't wait for the service to fail spectacularly, and cause a lot of grief, to educate the public about which services are okay and which are dangerous. You need a preemptive agency that will find these substandard services before they fail.
If people buy a buggy piece of software for your home PC and it fails, it won't cause as much grief as if a plane, for example, falls out of the sky. You can quite easily distinguish which services need to be regulated and which do not by how much grief they will cause the public if they fail.
Commerce systems are in the league of services that need to be regulated. If a commerce system fails and people get hold of sensitive information, the repocussions are serious.
It makes sense that the regulating body should be a government agency. A government agency (one would hope anyways) would be less succeptible to hidden agendas and corruption than a for profit organisation.
A rifle is more dangerous because it makes mass murder much easier.
Sure, a knife or an iron bar will kill a person as will a rifle; but running around with an iron bar killing a group of people is much harder than sitting on a rooftop taking pot shots at people with a rifle.
I agree that people mature at different rates, but you still need some measure of a person's maturity. If you are not going to judge someone's maturity by their age, what other yardstick are you going to use? Do you make people take a "maturity test" and if they pass give them a maturity card to carry in their wallets? It's not perfect, but a person's age is the best measure of maturity I can think of. Any other form of measuring a person's maturity becomes a pain in the ass to administer.