Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

The Law Can’t Keep Up With Technology…and That’s a Very Good Thing

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-victory-for-the-people dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Today, thanks to political gridlock in the U.S., lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. As government gets slower, tech is going the opposite way. New technologies spread instantly by cloud-based apps and social networks, and take hold with almost no legal oversight. Then, by the time government can act, it's usually too late to wind things back to the way they were.

And this, as it turns out, is terrific for tech startups, especially those aimed at demolishing creaky old norms—like taxis, or flight paths over crowded airspace, or money. Lately, the law vs. tech gap is making headlines as it upends the rules around sports gambling. The daily fantasy sports sites FanDuel and DraftKings are showing how fast technology can exploit the gap and put government on its heels.

This problem is as old as law itself. From thrown rocks to spears, bow and arrow to guns, agricultural to industrial economies, government has always had this problem.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Law Can’t Keep Up With Technology…and That’s a Very Good Thing | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 18 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:53AM (#257800)
    Government not understanding technology is not a good thing. All of this "disruption" that is occurring without regulation is jeopardizing careers and stagnating wages, to the point where there's arguments of "living wage" to offset the income instability for most Americans... something that would have been thought an unthinkable topic 10 years ago. Bitcoin has caused more problems than it has solved, and it has become the de facto currency of the blackest of black-hat hackers, as well as organized crime. Law enforcement is at a point where it is its own cartel of angry hornets, running completely unchecked due to a series of captive "regulators": the FBI (who are themselves a corrupt and technologically-incompetent law enforcement cartel), and the Department of Justice. Members of Congress are either almost antediluvian in their understanding of technology, or are completely captive to lobbyists. And that's to say nothing of the Presidential candidates.

    Uber and Lyft are societal leeches, replacing some problems of the old creaky taxi companies, but bringing far more inequality and harm due to lack of insurance and immature business practices. "The Cloud" doesn't know what it is supposed to be, or what problem it's supposed to solve; only that it's supposed to be as disruptive as possible to existing infrastructure, forgetting almost all of the lessons learned about running infrastructure. Remember the huge AWS outage on October 23rd? Here's a detailed analysis [systemswatch.com].

    FanDuel and DraftKings are a scourge on the sports scene, in an entertainment ecosystem already partially crippled by "fantasy sports", where taking an MLB-esque obsession with statistics and injecting it with steroids saps all of the fun out of watching the actual event. Someone somewhere thought that the situation wasn't dire enough, and decided to come up with a way to sap money out of millions of more gullible Joe Sixpacks who can't turn away from "get-rich-quick schemes". We already had something like this: it was called Vegas and Atlantic City sports bookies. This flies in the face of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 [wikipedia.org].

    Techno-libertarians and acolytes of Clayton Christensen are completely oblivious to the negative affects of an almost complete lack of regulation due to an almost completely techno-incompetent (and tech-lobbyist-captive) Congress. It is a disgusting country right now, which is silently choking on its own tongue. And yet we're about to ramp up into a full year of politics that will completely ignore all of it.

    I will now read from a passage of a James Fallows article from The Atlantic, which was published in summer 2005, of a "Master Strategy Memo" for the future president-elect, dated January 20, 2016. (It is from an editorial column called "Countdown To A Meltdown", here [theatlantic.com].

    My father, in explaining why it was so painful for him to see a lifetime's savings melt away after the Venezuelan crisis, told me about a political speech he remembered from his own youth. It was by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor who later became a politician. In the late 1960s, when American prosperity held despite bitter political turmoil, Moynihan told left-wing students why preserving that prosperity should be important even to them. We know Europe from its novels, Moynihan said: the old ones, by Austen and Dickens and Stendahl, and the more recent ones, too. We know it as a static society. Young people, seeking opportunity, have to wait for old people to die. A whole life's prospects depend on the size of an inheritance. People know their place. America, Moynihan said fifty years ago, must never become a place like that.

    That is the place we have become. Half this country's households live on less than $50,000 a year. That sounds like a significant improvement from the $44,000 household median in 2003. But a year in private college now costs $83,000, a day in a hospital $1,350, a year in a nursing home $150,000—and a gallon of gasoline $9. Thus we start off knowing that for half our people there is no chance—none—of getting ahead of the game. And really, it's more like 80 percent of the public that is priced out of a chance for future opportunity. We have made a perfect circle—perfect in closing off options. There are fewer attractive jobs to be had, even though the ones at the top, for financiers or specialty doctors, are very attractive indeed. And those who don't start out with advantages in getting those jobs have less and less chance of moving up to them.

    (The scenario in Fallows' article was far more dire, including an oil shock triggered by Fidel Castro's death, a democratic President called "the Preacher", and the first black President being a republican former soldier... and not Colin Powell.)

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +5  
       Insightful=1, Interesting=2, Informative=2, Total=5
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Total Score:   5  

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:28AM (#257814)

    FanDuel and DraftKings are a scourge on the sports scene

    The sports scene is a scourge on the sports scene. It's all simply trash.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:32AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:32AM (#257816)

      The sports scene is a scourge on the sports scene. It's all simply trash.

      It is, but it's the least fake thing on television, with at least some semblance of an outcome not pre-determined by Hollywood producers (unless of course you count game-throwing, point-shaving, and other things we'll probably hear about in 4 years or so. But at least it's better than "reality" television or watching that three ring circus called Hollywood).

      • (Score: 4, Touché) by quadrox on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:23AM

        by quadrox (315) on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:23AM (#257834)

        Watching sports on TV is better than reality TV in the same way that shooting yourself in the foot is better than shooting yourself in the head. One might be preferable to the other, but I wouldn't want to do either.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:44AM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:44AM (#257841) Journal

    FanDuel and DraftKings are a scourge on the sports scene, in an entertainment ecosystem already partially crippled by "fantasy sports"

    You over state your case. In fact, I don't think you have a case. Partially crippled? Scourge? seriously?
    This is merely an temporary aberration, a simple instance of fraud. It gets taken care of by the usual means.
    There is no reason to go all maudlin and drag government into every new development in the tech world just to prevent the fleecing of a few gullible early adopters.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:45PM (#258046)

      This is merely an temporary aberration, a simple instance of fraud. It gets taken care of by the usual means.

      The implementation of rules and regulations? Which proves that the point of the article is completely wrong, government not understanding technology is not a good thing at all. The government's failure to understand technology is why the DEA and NSA are allowed to do what they're doing, despite their unconstitutionality and illegality.