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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

commitments on this label (including the support period) will be legally enforceable in contract and tort lawsuits and under other laws.

When it comes to U.S. laws that touch technology, enforceability is a mess. Spyware, spam, fraud, misleading labels, etc. are already governed by various state and federal laws, yet enforcement efforts are whack-a-mole at best.

For IoT devices, having the proposed requirements sounds good in theory but I fear it is practically unenforceable, particularly for consumer-grade devices manufactured overseas.

However, if powerful IoT platforms are also tied into the new regs - with Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, PTC, HPE, etc. required to audit supposedly qualified devices and ban those that don't meet the standards, with escalating penalties for failing to do so - that might shift the needle.

My 2 cents.

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Your point about buyers at scale is really important. The current effort is focused on sellers, but we think that if sellers have to define their security commitments, buyers will pay attention and their risk management people will insist on high standards.

I fear it is practically unenforceable, particularly for consumer-grade devices manufactured overseas

Also a good point. The way we handle this for RF interference is to look at distributors and importers, not just manufacturers, but there will probably always be an untrustworthy product tier out there.

They're proposing an opt-in labeling program that essentially amounts for to the FCC underwriting certain attestations that vendors are choosing to make about their products.

This means that someone applying the label without meeting the standards the label indicates would be guilty of exactly the sort of fraudulent advertising you're describing, and contract and tort law are the relevant mechanisms of enforcement for this.

I'm not sure what you mean by enforcement efforts being "whack-a-mole at best", but if you're expecting some sort of preemptive regulatory barrier to be enforced by a bureaucratic agency in advance, that's just not the way this sort of thing works or is intended to work, and the FCC certainly wouldn't have the legal authority to implement such a regime.

Legal actions for fraud, false advertising, trademark infringement (in the case of trademarked standards certification badges, e.g. UL) are frequently used mechanisms for this sort of thing, and seem to work well enough to ensure that vendors are deterred from fraudulently applying certification labels to their products.

Hmm, yeah. Just as fraud telemarketers set up a new shell run by the same principals when the legal bills come due for their old one, so we're likely to see new labels for a new shell company slapped on the same old insecure IoT box.

So I'm not sure "escalating penalties" is going to cut it. It's still whack-a-mole. You need a way to kill the mole, not just drive it to pop up a new hole.

You need a way to get to the principals. They're the mole.

You need to either make them personally liable financially, or you need to jail them. Nothing else is going to stop serial fraud-behind-a-shell-company.

I'm not sure I have an answer. But whatever answer there is needs to be applied not only to fraud telemarketers (please), but also to fraud IoT manufacturers/resellers.

If there’s a private right of action you can bet the class action lawyers will do the enforcing.

Fair enough, but against whom?

Fly-by-night foreign manufacturers or exporters would be difficult to prosecute. Unless the domestic importer, reseller, or transportation provider can be held liable, even class action lacks teeth.

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