3 ms·
What if a standards body obeyed Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics?
- jared314 16y agoI'm not sure you can define how a standard can "injure" users.
- jerf 16y agoA standard can require the use of patented code, allowing the patent holders to hold the users hostage. A standard can mandate enormous unnecessary complexity that benefits large corporations by locking out smaller competition, which is a loss to the users (who lose out on competition and a rich market). The text of the standard can be locked behind a paywall, another way of raising the bar for no good reason. A standard can be written with no regard for users at all and consequently fail, wasting valuable standards-writing time (XHTML2). A standard can be written that imposes mandatory DRM, and I'm yet to see the DRM system that actually benefits a user. And perhaps most commonly, a standard can be not-written-at-all, locking the user in for the pleasure of the company (MS Word and friends). Many of these are often combined.
- serhei 16y agoIf we're talking about hypothetical, mostly unenforceable principles, maybe it's the corporations that should follow the Three Laws of Robotics and not the standards?