When I and a group of software engineers sit in a room and discuss policy, we always end up pedantic about (more or less) the points around enforceability, wording, loopholes etc. We're software engineers and we're trained to think about precision, edge cases. We want things to be nice and uniform, laws should be objective like code.
Hackernews attracts the same crowd, and the law seems to do the same.
But why? Why is it so hard to write a law like: "hey if you're clearly being a monopoly / duopoly, you're gonna be on the hook".
Obviously that language is far too vague, but it feels like trying to be overly precise INVITES these kinds of shenanigans.
Moreso, fighting these laws ends up being quite expensive. So you basically have the spirit of the law that applies to general people and nothing that applies to large corporations and the super rich.
We seem to get pedantic about the letter, even when it's obviously against the spirit of the law.
Hackernews attracts the same crowd, and the law seems to do the same.
But why? Why is it so hard to write a law like: "hey if you're clearly being a monopoly / duopoly, you're gonna be on the hook".
Obviously that language is far too vague, but it feels like trying to be overly precise INVITES these kinds of shenanigans.
Moreso, fighting these laws ends up being quite expensive. So you basically have the spirit of the law that applies to general people and nothing that applies to large corporations and the super rich.
We seem to get pedantic about the letter, even when it's obviously against the spirit of the law.