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I M A G E B Y A N T O N K H R U P I N

Heroic policy interventions by government often fail, especially when aimed at industry self-regulation. Governments for the last 20 years have spent a great deal of time realizing how little governments can do effectively in steering toward better self-regulation by the industry, as well as the unintended consequences of badly constructed legal mechanisms. Experts have to continually advise in favor of independent scientific evidence gathering and against corporate and public safety advocates’ claims that the sky is falling. The

IN THIS COLUMN, I explore the various means by which law- yers can be helped by com- puter scientists to stop the (inevitable) collateral damage to innovation when the unstoppable force of legislation hits the irresistible innovation of the Internet. 1 I will explore some current controversies (fake news, Net neutrality, platform regulation) from an international perspective. The conclusion is familiar: lawyers and computer scientists need each other to prevent a disastrous retrenchment toward splintered national-regional intranets. To avoid that, we need to be intellectually pragmatic in pursuing what may be a mutually disagreeable aim: minimal legislative reform to achieve co-regulation using the most independent expert advice. The alternatives are to allow libertarian advocates to so enrage politicians that severe overregulation results.

Regulation should first do no
harm. That is easy to state, difficult
to achieve, when legislation is the
clumsiest version of the engineering
principle of the ‘Birmingham Screw-
driver’: to a legislator, every problem
looks like a new bill will solve it, and
worse, to an international lawyer ev-
ery problem looks like a new Conven-
tion or Treaty is needed. Yet in reality,
all that law can achieve is to enforce
against a few bad actors to prevent the
most egregious overreaching by com-
panies and users. More negatively, the
worst law can do is overlegislate in the
interests of monopolies old and new
to prevent technological progress (one
example: a man carrying a red flag in
front of the first motor vehicles, which
protected stagecoaches and railways
from innovative competition). 2,a
a United Kingdom: Locomotives Act 1865 s. 3
(An Act for farther regulating the use of Lo-
comotives on Turnpike and other roads for
Agricultural and other purposes: 28 & 29 Vic.
Chapter lxxxiii).

Law and Technology
How Law and Computer Science
Can Work Together to Improve
the Information Society
Seeking to remedy bad legislation with good science.
DOI: 10.1145/3163907