When I and a group of software engineers sit in a room and discuss policy, we always end up pedantic about (more or less) the points around enforceability, wording, loopholes etc. We're software engineers and we're trained to think about precision, edge cases. We want things to be nice and uniform, laws should be objective like code.
Hackernews attracts the same crowd, and the law seems to do the same.
But why? Why is it so hard to write a law like: "hey if you're clearly being a monopoly / duopoly, you're gonna be on the hook".
Obviously that language is far too vague, but it feels like trying to be overly precise INVITES these kinds of shenanigans.
Moreso, fighting these laws ends up being quite expensive. So you basically have the spirit of the law that applies to general people and nothing that applies to large corporations and the super rich.
We seem to get pedantic about the letter, even when it's obviously against the spirit of the law.
I think the typical answer from political science is:
Because enforcing laws based on spirit rather than text has proven, again and again throughout history, to be a pretty direct path to selective enforcement (including subjective variance leading to legal unpredictability, favoritism, and persecution). When the rule of law is selective, corruption and authoritarianism increase.
Like, that's not the only way to get corruption and authoritarianism: our existing system of regulatory capture and massive-resources-required-for-legal-action is a case in point of that.
But "let's make it OK to arrest people when everybody knows that they're doing something illegal, even if it can't be proven under specific laws" is pretty much textbook descent into vibes-based authoritarian rule. And yeah, one of the big drawbacks of that approach is that it creates a class of experts at navigating the boundaries of the law. But the alternative is much, much worse.
When I and a group of software engineers sit in a room and discuss policy, we always end up pedantic about (more or less) the points around enforceability, wording, loopholes etc. We're software engineers and we're trained to think about precision, edge cases. We want things to be nice and uniform, laws should be objective like code.
Hackernews attracts the same crowd, and the law seems to do the same.
But why? Why is it so hard to write a law like: "hey if you're clearly being a monopoly / duopoly, you're gonna be on the hook".
Obviously that language is far too vague, but it feels like trying to be overly precise INVITES these kinds of shenanigans.
Moreso, fighting these laws ends up being quite expensive. So you basically have the spirit of the law that applies to general people and nothing that applies to large corporations and the super rich.
We seem to get pedantic about the letter, even when it's obviously against the spirit of the law.
I think the typical answer from political science is:
Because enforcing laws based on spirit rather than text has proven, again and again throughout history, to be a pretty direct path to selective enforcement (including subjective variance leading to legal unpredictability, favoritism, and persecution). When the rule of law is selective, corruption and authoritarianism increase.
Like, that's not the only way to get corruption and authoritarianism: our existing system of regulatory capture and massive-resources-required-for-legal-action is a case in point of that.
But "let's make it OK to arrest people when everybody knows that they're doing something illegal, even if it can't be proven under specific laws" is pretty much textbook descent into vibes-based authoritarian rule. And yeah, one of the big drawbacks of that approach is that it creates a class of experts at navigating the boundaries of the law. But the alternative is much, much worse.