[90941] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: insane over-regulation - what not to do
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Woodcock)
Wed Jun 21 13:41:13 2006
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:40:07 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net>
To: Randy Whitney <randy.whitney@verizonbusiness.com>
Cc: "'Randy Bush'" <randy@psg.com>, nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <016701c69555$421b1df0$e6922799@mcilink.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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
