Why are they banning the methods instead of saying how the pricing should be displayed. E.g. why say you cannot have "noindex" instead of saying "the pricing information needs to be in plain-text, human-readable, accessible, indexable..." and so on.
They do both. As well as provide a description of the regulation's goals, context and examples. This is how regulation works. It typically starts with a rather vague law, then the regulatory agencies make up general rules to implement said law. Then they create a bunch of more detailed rules. Then as times change, they amend those rules. You can even ask them about novel situations and get a (non-binding) "opinion" from government agency. In my experience, the federal gov regulatory apparatus is not as inept as most people seem to think.
That’s a good way to write a law but regulations are guidance under which the regulator won’t come after you when it considers law enforcement action i.e. the law enforcement agency’s interpretation of the law and your obligations under it. They can afford to get into the nitty gritty, and it can even be beneficial for them to do so for all involved.
This way lawyers don’t have to divine from the law that noindex and nofollow tags might invite enforcement action, if they have even heard of them before, they can read the regs, and advise their companies and clients properly.
Because wouldn't they have to keep adding new techniques to the list continuously when in the other case they can say in what format the content needs to be available in.
I stand corrected: encrypted PDFs are indexed unless a password is set. However, in the past they were unable to do so[0]: "Generally we can index textual content (written in any language) from PDF files that use various kinds of character encodings, provided they're not password protected or encrypted."
As I read this, it seems like this is saying that if you are saying that you are posting public pricing information, you should not be hiding that information from search engines.
Seems like it's trying to avoid people (I guess it's targeted toward insurers, if I'm reading the main page correctly) saying that they are transparent about prices but hiding the information so no one sees it.
Sure. I'm not saying make a new law then punish. I'm saying they should be punished based on the existing law that said prices had to be published. Similar to punishing someone for tax evasion even though the specific technique they used wasn't explicitly enumerated in the law.
This will be a fun example of legalism v. Hacker ingenuity. Everytime they figure out a specific legal way to write up a trick to hide prices, the folks will find another loophole to hide them.
We've changed the title from "Regulartors ban hospitals from using “noindex, nofollow” on pricing pages" to what the page says.
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