Using Law Against Technology | Hacker News Reader

Using Law Against Technology

schneier.com

63 pointsprivong37 comments

> It's one aspect of a tech policy problem that has been plaguing us for at least 25 years: technologists and policymakers don't understand each other

Policy makers do understand very well. This has not been going on for the last 25 years, this has been going on for hundreds of years. That is policy makers blocking new technologies to grant artificial monopolies to incumbents. The UK mercantilism from the 16th century comes to mind with the government trying to block cheaper wool and then new cotton tech to defend traditional wool merchants and justifying this with "a lack of license and legality" issues cheaper rural wood merchants and cotton merchants supposedly had.

As the saying goes: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

As long as you will have governments with the power to shut down new technologies you will have incumbents willing to bribe those governments into doing so. Apart removing the government from the equation or at least its power, I don't think we will ever solve this issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United...

https://mises.org/library/mercantilism-england

That's why ideas which Lawrence Lessig is explaining are perhaps most valuable in the current US political cycle.

However, even without proposed decoupling of money and power we ought to consider alternatives. That could be at least faster - if not more achievable.

What Lawrence Lessig is proposing is not enough. As long as the government has the power to block new technologies and other legitimate new business ideas, there will be incumbents there to bribe them into doing so. Even if you make laws that totally forbid campaign financing. Look at what happened in Germany, the chancellor didn't get any money but when he retired, he got a great mysterious job at a Russian oil company:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany

Give the government unlimited/huge power to regulate the market and money will find its way to the politicians in order to influence them, one way or the other. The only way to stop this is not to forbid campaign financing, super PAC or else. No, the only way to stop this is to do something most of us are not willing to do: complete separation of the economy and the State, just like total separation of Church and State was the only way to stop religious persecution, nothing short of total separation of the State and the economy will stop unfair and corrupt driven anti-tech and anti-new businesses laws.

How do you then regulate players in the economy to ensure that the harm to society caused by unfettered business is minimised?

If a business initiates force against you or damages your property, you should have the legal right to attack them.

What happens when, or if, the economy becomes dominated by a handful of actors who impose monopolistic economic inefficiencies just as damaging as any the state could have conjured, and with the additional injury that there is no democratic way to reverse them?

The argument here is that monopolies can only exist when the State is protecting them. In a free market with no State intervention, if an actor misbehave by abusing its position, it creates a business opportunity for competing services to spring. See the taxi industry, they offered very bad services, refusing rides, mistreating customers etc so what happened? Uber, Lyft and others saw the business opportunity to offer cheaper, more efficient services. Only in cities where the government banned the competition is the taxi industry allowed to continue its monopolistic abuses.

There's some cognitive dissonance between how people nod sagely at this vs. how they react when FAA rules force Flytenow to shut down. Note the commenters' largely gleeful reaction to that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779607

You can't cry foul when a coin comes up tails if you were happy the whole time it was coming up heads. Agencies that have the power to make good decisions by force also have the power to make bad decisions by force.

That's fallacious reasoning. It's like saying people are nodding sagely when doctors do successful surgeries then crying foul when they commit malpractice and operate on the wrong leg.

The difference I'd point to is that surgery as a system generally works. Fresh med school graduates get hired, train for a few years, and mostly become competent surgeons. Incompetent ones mostly get weeded out, or boxed into careers that minimize any harm they do. And they're (rightly) forced by lawsuits to compensate victims of genuine malpractice.

Regulatory agencies, by contrast, are an extremely fragile system. That's in the sense that if the right people are in charge, it could go well, but if the wrong people are in charge, it's a disaster. And it's completely commonplace to find that the wrong people are in charge.

A good system either makes it very hard for the wrong people to gain control, or, to use a Milton Friedman line, "makes it profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing".

What I was trying to say with my comment is that neither of those conditions is true at most regulatory agencies.

I don't think this is a good comparison. What karzeem is saying is more of a matter of principle: does any one or any group of people has the moral right to initiate force against two consenting adults agreeing to a mutual contract because we think we know better than they do about what's best for them?

If the answer to this question is yes, then you have no right to complain when it happens to something you enjoy consenting to because a group of people think it might not be best for you.

> does any one or any group of people has the moral right to initiate force against two consenting adults agreeing to a mutual contract because we think we know better than they do about what's best for them?

Yes. Society broadly has this 'right' if you want to call it that (I would refer to it as a 'duty'), though we are wise to exercise power there in a reasonably limited fashion e.g. making up a 'Bill of Rights' etc. What you're referring to forms the basis of the FDA, of OSHA, of the EPA, etc etc., all of which have had an overall positive effect on our economic health, our environmental health, and our literal bodily health. Monopolizing force and using it to promote egalitarian principles is a fundamental part of what makes Western civilization.

You seem to be suggesting that if we as a people decide to enact and enforce laws via our elected government at all, then we give up the right to complain about laws we perceive to be unjust, and agitate for change. In fact, that is precisely how the system is meant to work. Just because you're miffed you aren't getting your way all the time, is no reason to tear the whole system down, and I think you'll find yourself part of a vanishingly small minority in believing so (very fortunately, even for you, even if you don't realize it).

> Monopolizing force and using it to promote egalitarian principles is a fundamental part of what makes Western civilization.

Yes, I think giving up force to a monopoly is a terrible idea. Also, I don't see how forbidding two consenting adults from committing victim-less crimes (ie non-legal mutual contracts) is promoting equality. If anything, it's promoting tyranny.

> and I think you'll find yourself part of a vanishingly small minority in believing so (very fortunately, even for you, even if you don't realize it).

Yeah, I was told the same thing living in a very religious country when telling people about my atheism so I'm used to this kind of patronizing. Funny how Statism sounds exactly like religion. Bastiat was right when he said the State replaced the Church with little differences.

> Bastiat was right when he said the State replaced the Church with little differences.

Yes, yes. Good for you that your threw off the yoke of your oppression or whatever the shit you're blabbering about. If the preference to live under the rule of law makes me a fucking "statist" then call me a statist.

The problem is that the State doesn't respect the rule of law and basic human rights. The war on drugs, spying on citizens, habeas corpus, the Patriot Act, illegal wars, torture and so on are just a few examples that come to mind.

In most democracies "The State" is more responsive to the will of the people than you give it credit for, though I will agree with you that it is not as responsive as either of us would like. Moreover they are orders of magnitude more responsive to the will of the people, than whatever strongman or military junta would inevitably fill in the enormous power vacuum left in the wake of dismantling every government in the first world, assuming human civilization could indeed survive such an event in the first place. (And who would quickly reestablish a monopoly on force anyway.)

Nobody cares about two parties contracting. Regulation of contracts exists because of the systematic effects of particular types of contracts

This is a bit off topic, but I don't understand the government's need to stunt technology for the good of the country. Is there really a net benefit for spending trillions on cyber spying? I've yet to see a cost benefit analysis on that, and would appreciate any input on that.

There probably is not, but there is a benefit to those who make a living from spying and undermining freedom. Also, as a matter of psychology, most people prefer it when "something is being done" even when that something is ineffective or self-destructive, so there is some political motivation to "do something", so you can claim to "have done something" in case something bad happens, to avoid being responsible.

One would think that doing something like weakening and backdooring encryption would provide a negative net benefit because it helps hackers to steal information more readily. I guess it depends on what you think of the broken window fallacy.

Dammit Scheier, if you're going to point out a pile of shit you should also point out a shovel. Just saying "tehnologists and policymakers don't understand each other, and golly gosh we better do something about it" doesn't cut the mustard.

Maybe sometimes it's better to at least point to a problem - and even articulate it, as Schneier did - than do nothing, if you don't have a proposal.

How about bringing law technology - i.e. the technology of establishing laws - closer to the speed of modern times? Things are being done already in the realm of practicing existing laws, as in legal consulting, case search etc. Can we make tech which would help write better laws sooner?

The only reason not to offer even a list of possible solutions is because the problem is not be actionable in that framing. It is trivially easy to point out problems in a way that makes it difficult to find solutions. For example, "People don't understand computers well enough," or, "Politics today are just too divisive." Those statements are noise, not signal. The only way to make headway would be to get specific, divide them up, and at that point you're not solving the same problem.

BTW I appreciate your attempt to sketch out a shovel (and it's an interesting one!) but I don't think that really addresses Schneier's particular pile.

Finding problems and proposing solutions are different activities and it's in everybody's interest that we don't bind the former to the latter.

Let the people who see the problems describe them, even if they don't propose solutions. When somebody does both, try to separate one thing from the other because usually the problem is valid but the solution is wrong (see Marx).

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