alt Hacker NewsThis is some kind of a meme where people believe things can’t be defined in legal terms and therefore can’t be regulated. These people are usually not lawyers.
Does anyone know where it’s coming from? I can certainly believe that incompetent jurisdictions have a ton of issues with people misapplying the law and using loopholes.
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> This is some kind of a meme where people believe things can’t be defined in legal terms and therefore can’t be regulated. These people are usually not lawyers.
No they’re engineers who think rules have to function as rigidly in every field as they do in programming.
They either can’t or don’t want to accept that the law is a social construct and what it actually means to you is determined by the weight of precedent, as applied by judges and regulatory bodies. Things are vaguely worded in the law all the time. If people want to dispute how the enforcement is done they sue and judge decides how the rule should be applied.
It probably comes from the same pockets that influences legislation
The point isn't that it can't be regulated. What the original comment said was
> This is pretty easy to solve. If you present data by algorithm, you are no longer an impartial common carrier and are liable for the content you present.
But this is not in fact easy. It's hard to define what "present data by algorithm" means in a coherent way, and it's hard to extend liability for the content you present to liability for the manner in which you present it. You could make it work, if for some reason you really wanted to, but it's easier to pursue the strategy described in the source article of regulating specific abusive patterns.
Albert Hirschman wrote a great book about the rhetoric people use to stifle policy proposals 35 years ago. “It’s futile; it won’t ever work” is one common argument. It’s not a meme so much as a cynical reflexive intuition