There was an impassioned article (and extensively cross-linked to boot) by Larry Downes, the author, in The Washington Post about “modern Luddites” ruining the tech revolution for everyone else by their desire to have tech regulated.
Whilst I am of the view that, left unchecked, things can go bad quickly, the current pace of technological change means the historical checking agencies such as governments and their judiciaries are just not keeping up with those who are looking for ways in which to exploit technology for gain. As anyone who has ever studied Law will attest: getting Law made is not a quick exercise. And as anyone who has ever studied International Law will tell you: Treaties weren’t made in a day. I have no confidence that these systems, wrought through trial (sorry) and error over considerable amounts of time, are fit for the purpose of being able to regulate at the pace required to thwart the players.
The global nature of both the network and the platform means that consideration of who will commit a crime and who will be affected by that now transcends national boundaries, something law-makers and enforcers are both struggling with. Mr Downes laments that introductions of certain laws as attempts to compel the global players to follow some rules in both the EU and in California are going to hamper the beneficial applications of technology. Whilst he cites a number of good reasons why this is a problem, Mr Downes, offers up scant alternatives to keeping the players in check. But I am curious, absent law, how we will protect society from the consequences of rampant global technological development at high speed, with all its consequences, many of which we could not have foreseen.
I am loathe to throw away the regulation baby with the laissez faire bathwater and would prefer if the process by which law is made became more agile and global as the means of response. So I have to ask: Why we aren’t crowdsourcing law?
If Wikipedia can be written and Quora questions can be answered so accurately with a global pool of contributors, surely it is not too much of a stretch that law-making could benefit from the contributions of the collective wisdom of the global pool of legal scholars and practitioners? A quick search suggests, however, apart from a workshop about the topic earlier this year, that no one is really thinking about how we apply a sort of Wikipedia-Quora approach to solving what are now global legal issues. I know there are a lot of reasons why this would be complicated and complex to implement but it seems a relatively rapid response option to the pace of law making and one I think merits some further thought.
What is becoming evident in the Washington Russian meddling hearings is that the law is not sufficient, the consequences arising from the abuse of Facebook’s functionality could not possibly have been envisaged, the profit motives is keeping the players from truly doing anything about it, and the law-makers haven’t a clue what to do about it. This is going to become a recurring scenario as the law tries to respond using punishments that are no longer appropriate for the crime.
Unlike Mr Downes, I doubt there’s any real risk of tech Luddites killing tech progress — it would take too long to agree on the method of strangulation.