| > I believe it's possible to write laws that serve the people they're supposed to protect. I agree. In theory it should be possible to create a fully transparent legislative drafting process incorporating red-teaming, open comment periods and mandated iteration cycles where bugs and unintended consequences inconsistent with the original intent are required to be addressed years after a law is passed. I'd love to design such a process. Unfortunately, that's not at all how legislation gets made. It's opaque and fully penetrated at every level by highly-organized, well-funded special interests working to subvert the process in overt and covert ways. There have been entire books written about the incredibly sophisticated and devious ways legislation gets nerfed, loop-holed and corrupted. I once had dinner with a long-time Washington lobbyist for a public interest group. He has decades of experience seeing how the sausage is really made in the backrooms. It was a very depressing dinner. The one thing that doesn't happen in recent decades of U.S. law-making is any chance of revisiting and revising a law once it is passed and not working. The reality is the U.S. Constitution and law-making process was brilliantly conceived 250 years ago by smart people with the highest ideals for mankind. It's amazing that system survived for as long as it did. But it's now been corrupted by black hats at Ring 0. And you can't deploy patches to resecure a system once the patching process itself has been pwned. The only legislation which still gets passed in any reasonably pure form are things which no well-funded political or corporate vested interests care to fight over. Games now represent more yearly revenue than movies and music combined and most of the money now rolls-up to giants like MSFT, EA, Sony, etc. The chances of any legislation passing with real teeth to meaningfully restrict online games are virtually nil. Although if legislators see it as a popular enough issue, we might see a law pass with much fanfare but it will have subtle nerfs and kill-switches built in ensuring it makes no real difference in practice. If you're wondering why legislators propose such laws if they know they're doomed to ultimately make no difference, it's for two reasons: 1. To get some positive press just for proposing something they know will never be enacted in law, or 2. Proposing a law which very well-funded vested interests will mobilize to kill or nerf generates an extraordinary amount of cash "donations" to campaigns, political parties and PACs. I learned from the lobbyist I had dinner with that #2 is far more common than #1. |