[dtech]

That sounds like a prime example of incredible technical incompetence of the lawmakers or incredibly good lobbying by MS. Maybe both.

[Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd]

It made some sense at the time the law was conceived. SSL was crippled to uselessness by US export restrictions. IE 6 had a monopoly. So they built their own much more secure encryption (using ActiveX to plug into IE) and mandated its use for everything that matters.

The incompetence was in mandating a certain implementation instead of writing a technology-neutral law requiring a certain security level.

[scholia]

Interesting! So bad actions by the US gov led to bad results for US companies....

[Rhinobird]

Bad actions by the US gov led to bad workarounds by other govs