7 ms·

Right on. The legislators who consult with lobbyists behind closed doors and then produce thousand page bills would argue that they also make "smart" regulation

by zeteo 10y ago

Right on. The legislators who consult with lobbyists behind closed doors and then produce thousand page bills would argue that they also make "smart" regulation. Didn't they talk at length to the people who knew most about the issue? Doesn't the bill address lots of cases that would never occur to the "dumb" person? Yes, but the bill is totally ineffective for the average person and only helps the big players. What we arguably need is more "stupid" (as in "keep it simple, stupid") regulation. Constitutional Amendments are written in this style; also some antitrust legislation [1]. Complex regulations are vulnerable to a) hidden flaws - that tiny exception in article 57 paragraph 30 might turn out large enough to overturn all 56 previous articles. b) regulatory capture - lobbyists will, of course, introduce as many exceptions as possible if the text is long enough. c) the revolving door - if only a small group of people know the intricate details, they will soon be hired by the affected companies at a multiple of their previous salary. d) compliance cost - only large companies might be able to afford the compliance cost, which ends up concentrating the market further at the cost of the consumer (Dodd-Frank, anyone?). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act#Original_text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act#Original...

rayiner 10y ago
Can you give an example of a regulation in the airline industry that's causing all these problems that is of the kind you describe? Because it sounds to me like a strawman.
- passthefist 10y ago
  For one, there's cabotage restrictions. From wikipedia: > Cabotage rights are the right of a company from one country to trade in another country. In aviation, it is the right to operate within the domestic borders of another country. Most countries do not permit aviation cabotage, and there are strict sanctions against it, for reasons of economic protectionism, national security, or public safety. One notable exception is the European Union, whose Member States all grant cabotage rights to each other. Virgin America is usually regarded as one of the better airlines, and personally I've had pretty good experiences with them. I'll pay an extra twenty dollars for the extra customer service. It would have been nice to see the company grow larger and become a threat to the big 4 (Branson himself wanted to go in that direction), but it got bought/merged with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines has announced they are killing off the Virgin America brand sometime in 2019. > "Because I'm not American, the US Department of Transportation stipulated I take some of my shares in Virgin America as non-voting shares, reducing my influence over any takeover," Branson wrote of his powerlessness to halt the pending merger. "So there was sadly nothing I could do to stop it." Cabotage ends up being a form of protectionism, though it's usually touted as a national security thing. Compare this to the EU, which has some dirt cheap flights. Ryanair might suck, but I've flown from Dublin to Amsterdam for $10. The EU has less restrictions (almost none for member states, I think?), so there's more competition. Some domestic airlines have been trying the Ryanair model, but I'd like to see what would happen if Ryanair was able to expand to the states. This also means that foreign airlines can't operate flights between US cities, even if they'd be a leg of a larger journey. Instead they're reliant on US carriers to get people to their hubs. Toronto, for example, is the largest hub for Air Canada, and they have flights to dozens of American cities. There's no real fear that Canadian planes are any less safe than American ones, yet you can't use Air Canada to fly on a single ticket from an American city, via Toronto, to another American city. Air Canada's website won't even let you search for flights between two American destinations. It's even worse for someone like Air Emirates. They only have a handful of places they fly out of in the states, so if you're flying from Dubai to somewhere not on that list you'd need another ticket. Maybe they'd like to do a San Francisco to NYC to Dubai flight, moving to a collector model, but they're stuck doing point to point. I'd imagine flying people into a domestic collector city first would be cheaper than the many non-stop flights they currently have. http://fortune.com/2016/04/04/richard-branson-virgin-america/ http://fortune.com/2016/04/04/richard-branson-virgin-america...
  - rayiner 10y ago
    I asked for an example of the kind of regulation 'zeteo was complaining about (ones that involve "hidden flaws," "regulatory capture," "the revolving door," and/or excessive "compliance cost"). Whether or not it would be a good idea to permit foreign airlines to operate domestic flights, such restrictions are open and straightforward protectionism. They are not some "tiny exception in article 57 paragraph 30" that a regulator snuck in weeks before being "hired by the affected companies at a multiple of their previous salary."
  - notahacker 10y ago
    Cabotage restrictions really don't have anything to do with why Ryanair (or easyJet or Wizz) don't operate in the US though; it has no overlap whatsoever with the market they operate in, they don't do connecting flights and if the economics favoured the low cost model expanding to many more routes in the US then Southwest or US-based startups might have made more of a go of it in the last two or three decades (the US doesn't exactly suffer from lack of people with the knowhow and access to capital to start airline businesses if they think some routes are under-served). It's also possible for sufficiently motivated foreign entrepreneurs to circumvent with subsidiaries and joint ventures: the AirAsia operations are a good example of this. Cabotage might kill off a handful of potentially viable routes between the largest cities for relatively unusual multi-stage flights, but it's not really the reason why most domestic routes end up being local monopolies or duopolies. Emirates might have an interest flying an NYC-San Francisco leg, but it's difficult to imagine a foreign competitor being interested in a Denver-Houston route, never mind Denver-Wichita or Denver-Durango
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    > Virgin America is usually regarded as one of the better airlines, and personally I've had pretty good experiences with them. I'll pay an extra twenty dollars for the extra customer service. It would have been nice to see the company grow larger and become a threat to the big 4 (Branson himself wanted to go in that direction), but it got bought/merged with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines has announced they are killing off the Virgin America brand sometime in 2019. True. To my experience, though, I think that Alaska's customer service is comparable to Virgin's. I despite most US domestic airlines, with the exception of Virgin, Alaska, and to a lesser extent Delta.
entee 10y ago
I agree in principle. I would also argue that there should be a bias toward informational and clarity-enforcing regulation as opposed to specific action regulations. I.e. regulations that say, "you must disclose this clearly and transparently" as opposed to, "your widget must be minimum 12mm wide". That said, regulations that are less specific in the text of the law often yield cumbersome lawsuits and may end up with a huge volume of case law. Just because the law is 2 pages long doesn't mean you don't need an army of lawyers to comply with it. They'll just be parsing 2,000 page case law briefs and judicial rulings. Of course even specific laws generate lots of case volume, but still, short laws aren't a panacea. Smarter laws that seek to even out knowledge in the marketplace might be a better way to go as the economy gets more complex.
- zeteo 10y ago
  > regulations that are less specific in the text of the law often yield cumbersome lawsuits and may end up with a huge volume of case law Yes, but at least you have the chance beforehand that someone will say "this is not specific enough and will yield cumbersome lawsuits". If it's super long and complex then either a) there will be cumbersome lawsuits over parts of the law that are not completely consistent or b) the big guy with the big legal team will always win by default.
Brockenstein 10y ago
>Yes, but the bill is totally ineffective for the average person and only helps the big players. Any regulation that's over a sentence is too much for the lay person to bother reading or being aware of. In the case of the airlines I've seen this a lot were consumers have a lot of opinions how things ought to be. They're oblivious to the consequences of their demands. They don't have a clue what the current regulations are, so can't really have an opinion whether they're good or not. They just assume any time they're mad, regulations must be bad.
- zardo 10y ago
  >Any regulation that's over a sentence is too much for the lay person to bother reading or being aware of. You don't have to be a direct regulatee to be affected by a regulation. But... as someone that does read a lot of regulations, I generally agree that simpler is better. Or... in the case where we have complex regulations that all the large regulatees are implementing in expert systems anyways. Maybe we should just write executable regulations, we can still have a long list of ambiguous parameters for the lawyers to argue over.
  - alasdair_ 10y ago
    Regulations should come with a bunch of unit tests to ensure that at least the core cases work correctly.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      With airlines, you had that into the 1970s.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
What we arguably need is more "stupid" (as in "keep it simple, stupid") regulation Double right on. Needless complexity is probably the number one enemy of technology projects, consumer protections, market regulation, and good governance. Everybody at heart is a freaking architecture astronaut, and it's doing us no good at all. As an example of how things might work, government certainly has a role in defining products in a complex market; otherwise consumers would be at the whim of anybody who could make a good sales pitch. In the airline industry, I buy a ticket to go from point A to point B at a certain time. You can do a lot of hand-waving about how "normal" tickets don't guarantee any of this and how a more nuanced pricing system can allow all the seats to be filled, but that's bullshit. You can accomplish the same thing by simply having a two-tiered system: tickets that get you somewhere at a certain time, and ad-hoc tickets. Add one rule, say ad-hoc tickets can only be purchased in the 48-hours prior to a flight leaving, and you've got all the features of our modern system without all the crap that goes along with it. I think everybody means well, it's just that there are a ton of people in any regulatory system that can stop or slow-down things, yet they have absolutely no feedback mechanism in place at all to tell them whether what they're doing is actually helping rather than hurting. It's the same exact thing as we technologists see when we work in large organizations with byzantine structures that get in the way of progress and make no sense to anybody.
- jeremyt 10y ago
  Did you really just "Double right on" the need for smart regulation and then proceed to armchair quarterback your way to another useless regulation? Look, we don't have a problem with overbooking in this country (USA). I saw a chart with numbers of how many voluntary and involuntary losses of seats there were on each airline. Even if you add everything together for all the airlines, for the whole year, it's like 10,000. And a huge percentage of those are voluntary rebookings. Do you know how many people fly every day? You've just introduced an idea for yet another regulation to fix a nonexistent problem that will screw up the airlines pricing strategy and most likely raise ticket prices for everyone. Just let the market sort it out, and it appears it already has. Most of the airlines have already revised their rebooking procedure. We. Don't. Need. More. Regulation. Smart or not. This is exactly the problem. Everybody wants smart regulation, and everybody thinks they are the smart ones.

by zeteo 10y ago

rayiner 10y ago

Can you give an example of a regulation in the airline industry that's causing all these problems that is of the kind you describe? Because it sounds to me like a strawman.

passthefist 10y ago
For one, there's cabotage restrictions. From wikipedia: > Cabotage rights are the right of a company from one country to trade in another country. In aviation, it is the right to operate within the domestic borders of another country. Most countries do not permit aviation cabotage, and there are strict sanctions against it, for reasons of economic protectionism, national security, or public safety. One notable exception is the European Union, whose Member States all grant cabotage rights to each other. Virgin America is usually regarded as one of the better airlines, and personally I've had pretty good experiences with them. I'll pay an extra twenty dollars for the extra customer service. It would have been nice to see the company grow larger and become a threat to the big 4 (Branson himself wanted to go in that direction), but it got bought/merged with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines has announced they are killing off the Virgin America brand sometime in 2019. > "Because I'm not American, the US Department of Transportation stipulated I take some of my shares in Virgin America as non-voting shares, reducing my influence over any takeover," Branson wrote of his powerlessness to halt the pending merger. "So there was sadly nothing I could do to stop it." Cabotage ends up being a form of protectionism, though it's usually touted as a national security thing. Compare this to the EU, which has some dirt cheap flights. Ryanair might suck, but I've flown from Dublin to Amsterdam for $10. The EU has less restrictions (almost none for member states, I think?), so there's more competition. Some domestic airlines have been trying the Ryanair model, but I'd like to see what would happen if Ryanair was able to expand to the states. This also means that foreign airlines can't operate flights between US cities, even if they'd be a leg of a larger journey. Instead they're reliant on US carriers to get people to their hubs. Toronto, for example, is the largest hub for Air Canada, and they have flights to dozens of American cities. There's no real fear that Canadian planes are any less safe than American ones, yet you can't use Air Canada to fly on a single ticket from an American city, via Toronto, to another American city. Air Canada's website won't even let you search for flights between two American destinations. It's even worse for someone like Air Emirates. They only have a handful of places they fly out of in the states, so if you're flying from Dubai to somewhere not on that list you'd need another ticket. Maybe they'd like to do a San Francisco to NYC to Dubai flight, moving to a collector model, but they're stuck doing point to point. I'd imagine flying people into a domestic collector city first would be cheaper than the many non-stop flights they currently have. http://fortune.com/2016/04/04/richard-branson-virgin-america/ http://fortune.com/2016/04/04/richard-branson-virgin-america...
- rayiner 10y ago
  I asked for an example of the kind of regulation 'zeteo was complaining about (ones that involve "hidden flaws," "regulatory capture," "the revolving door," and/or excessive "compliance cost"). Whether or not it would be a good idea to permit foreign airlines to operate domestic flights, such restrictions are open and straightforward protectionism. They are not some "tiny exception in article 57 paragraph 30" that a regulator snuck in weeks before being "hired by the affected companies at a multiple of their previous salary."
- notahacker 10y ago
  Cabotage restrictions really don't have anything to do with why Ryanair (or easyJet or Wizz) don't operate in the US though; it has no overlap whatsoever with the market they operate in, they don't do connecting flights and if the economics favoured the low cost model expanding to many more routes in the US then Southwest or US-based startups might have made more of a go of it in the last two or three decades (the US doesn't exactly suffer from lack of people with the knowhow and access to capital to start airline businesses if they think some routes are under-served). It's also possible for sufficiently motivated foreign entrepreneurs to circumvent with subsidiaries and joint ventures: the AirAsia operations are a good example of this. Cabotage might kill off a handful of potentially viable routes between the largest cities for relatively unusual multi-stage flights, but it's not really the reason why most domestic routes end up being local monopolies or duopolies. Emirates might have an interest flying an NYC-San Francisco leg, but it's difficult to imagine a foreign competitor being interested in a Denver-Houston route, never mind Denver-Wichita or Denver-Durango
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  > Virgin America is usually regarded as one of the better airlines, and personally I've had pretty good experiences with them. I'll pay an extra twenty dollars for the extra customer service. It would have been nice to see the company grow larger and become a threat to the big 4 (Branson himself wanted to go in that direction), but it got bought/merged with Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines has announced they are killing off the Virgin America brand sometime in 2019. True. To my experience, though, I think that Alaska's customer service is comparable to Virgin's. I despite most US domestic airlines, with the exception of Virgin, Alaska, and to a lesser extent Delta.

entee 10y ago

I agree in principle. I would also argue that there should be a bias toward informational and clarity-enforcing regulation as opposed to specific action regulations. I.e. regulations that say, "you must disclose this clearly and transparently" as opposed to, "your widget must be minimum 12mm wide". That said, regulations that are less specific in the text of the law often yield cumbersome lawsuits and may end up with a huge volume of case law. Just because the law is 2 pages long doesn't mean you don't need an army of lawyers to comply with it. They'll just be parsing 2,000 page case law briefs and judicial rulings. Of course even specific laws generate lots of case volume, but still, short laws aren't a panacea. Smarter laws that seek to even out knowledge in the marketplace might be a better way to go as the economy gets more complex.

zeteo 10y ago
> regulations that are less specific in the text of the law often yield cumbersome lawsuits and may end up with a huge volume of case law Yes, but at least you have the chance beforehand that someone will say "this is not specific enough and will yield cumbersome lawsuits". If it's super long and complex then either a) there will be cumbersome lawsuits over parts of the law that are not completely consistent or b) the big guy with the big legal team will always win by default.

Brockenstein 10y ago

>Yes, but the bill is totally ineffective for the average person and only helps the big players. Any regulation that's over a sentence is too much for the lay person to bother reading or being aware of. In the case of the airlines I've seen this a lot were consumers have a lot of opinions how things ought to be. They're oblivious to the consequences of their demands. They don't have a clue what the current regulations are, so can't really have an opinion whether they're good or not. They just assume any time they're mad, regulations must be bad.

zardo 10y ago
>Any regulation that's over a sentence is too much for the lay person to bother reading or being aware of. You don't have to be a direct regulatee to be affected by a regulation. But... as someone that does read a lot of regulations, I generally agree that simpler is better. Or... in the case where we have complex regulations that all the large regulatees are implementing in expert systems anyways. Maybe we should just write executable regulations, we can still have a long list of ambiguous parameters for the lawyers to argue over.
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  Regulations should come with a bunch of unit tests to ensure that at least the core cases work correctly.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    With airlines, you had that into the 1970s.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

What we arguably need is more "stupid" (as in "keep it simple, stupid") regulation Double right on. Needless complexity is probably the number one enemy of technology projects, consumer protections, market regulation, and good governance. Everybody at heart is a freaking architecture astronaut, and it's doing us no good at all. As an example of how things might work, government certainly has a role in defining products in a complex market; otherwise consumers would be at the whim of anybody who could make a good sales pitch. In the airline industry, I buy a ticket to go from point A to point B at a certain time. You can do a lot of hand-waving about how "normal" tickets don't guarantee any of this and how a more nuanced pricing system can allow all the seats to be filled, but that's bullshit. You can accomplish the same thing by simply having a two-tiered system: tickets that get you somewhere at a certain time, and ad-hoc tickets. Add one rule, say ad-hoc tickets can only be purchased in the 48-hours prior to a flight leaving, and you've got all the features of our modern system without all the crap that goes along with it. I think everybody means well, it's just that there are a ton of people in any regulatory system that can stop or slow-down things, yet they have absolutely no feedback mechanism in place at all to tell them whether what they're doing is actually helping rather than hurting. It's the same exact thing as we technologists see when we work in large organizations with byzantine structures that get in the way of progress and make no sense to anybody.

jeremyt 10y ago
Did you really just "Double right on" the need for smart regulation and then proceed to armchair quarterback your way to another useless regulation? Look, we don't have a problem with overbooking in this country (USA). I saw a chart with numbers of how many voluntary and involuntary losses of seats there were on each airline. Even if you add everything together for all the airlines, for the whole year, it's like 10,000. And a huge percentage of those are voluntary rebookings. Do you know how many people fly every day? You've just introduced an idea for yet another regulation to fix a nonexistent problem that will screw up the airlines pricing strategy and most likely raise ticket prices for everyone. Just let the market sort it out, and it appears it already has. Most of the airlines have already revised their rebooking procedure. We. Don't. Need. More. Regulation. Smart or not. This is exactly the problem. Everybody wants smart regulation, and everybody thinks they are the smart ones.