North American Network Operators Group

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RE: insane over-regulation - what not to do

  • From: Bill Woodcock
  • Date: Wed Jun 21 13:55:19 2006

      On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Randy Whitney wrote:
    > Could you be more specific? Are you talking about "Part VIII
    > DOMAIN NAME REGISTAR" or something else?

Not presuming to answer for Randy, just for myself:

This follows one of the typical failure-modes of technical legislation, 
which is that it contains quite a few good ideas (cryptographic signatures 
should be deemed to fulfill the role of signatures, nonrepudiatable  
electronic delivery should be deemed to constitute delivery, etc.) which 
are re-worded in less-specific "more accessible" language by lawyers, 
chopped into very small bits, mixed and blended until uniformly 
unrecognizable, and allowed to ferment until twelve times larger.

These things typically create a bit of a baby-with-the-bathwater conundrum 
for people who think they know what _should_ be done, since many of the 
things that _should_ be done are in fact buried in the legalese, and 
starting over from scratch with the same seeds would, like as not, yield 
a very similar bloated bloated end-product, with another year or two 
wasted in the mean-time.  Which all comes down to the old maxim: you can't 
legislate stupidity out of existence.  Or, perhaps, legislation, by its 
very existence, brings some stupidity into existence.

Less is more.

                                -Bill