I’m kind of on this “Congress isn’t doing its job” kick lately. Here are two more areas where they are lying down on the job.
First, the antitrust laws are like 130 years old. They were written before anyone even knew what a radio was, much less how to deal with the Internet. But, because they are the law of the land, the Executive and Judicial branches are charged with enforcing them. The current laws are wholly unable to deal with questions like “How can something be a monopoly when they give their product away? Or “If Google is a monopoly, what exactly are they a monopoly of?”
The Securities Exchange Act is like 90 years old and utterly unable to even remotely deal with things like blockchain tokens. (Never mind that the people at the SEC seem utterly ignorant about what blockchain is and does…)
The problem here isn’t that the Executive branch is doing a crappy job (though they kind of are). The problem here is that Congress needs to get their asses out of the makeup chair at CNN and start passing legislation that we need to move forward. They aren’t doing their job, so we are stuck using these old, completely outdated legal tools to deal with things that couldn’t even be conceived of by the people that wrote them.
We get mad at the president or some faceless bureaucrat for all kinds of things, when the real problem is Congress.