It's ridiculous to say that a bad law is better than no law at all. If the law has massive collateral damage and little-to-no demonstrated benefit then it's just a bad law and should never have been made.

It seems far too common that regulations are putting the liability / responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem, and further, have limited power to do anything about the problem.

As they say, this is why we can't have nice things.

> What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?

To begin with, the premise would have to be challenged. Many, many bad regulations are bad because of incompetence or corruption rather than because better regulations are impossible. But let's consider the case where there really are no good regulations.

This often happens in situations where e.g. bad actors have more resources, or are willing to spend more resources, to subvert a system than ordinary people. For example, suppose the proposal is to ban major companies from implementing end-to-end encryption so the police can spy on terrorists. Well, that's not going to work very well because the terrorists will just use a different system that provides E2EE anyway and what you're really doing is compromising the security of all the law-abiding people who are now more vulnerable to criminals and foreign espionage etc.

The answer in these cases, where there are only bad policy proposals, is to do nothing. Accept that you don't have a good solution and a bad solution makes things worse rather than better so the absence of any rule, imperfect as the outcome may be, is the best we know how to do.

The classical example of this is the First Amendment. People say bad stuff, we don't like it, they suck and should shut up. But there is nobody you can actually trust to be the decider of who gets to say what, so the answer is nobody decides for everybody and imposing government punishment for speech is forbidden.

And sometimes good regulations are really hard to swallow for the uninformed, while bad regulations sound really good on paper.

"children are getting raped and we aren't going to do anything about it because we want to protect indie websites" sounds a lot worse than "this is a significant step in combatting the spread of online child pornography", even if reality is actually far more complicated.

> This is a truly hard problem.

CSAM is NOT a hard problem. You solve it with police work. That's how it always gets solved.

You don't solve CSAM with scanners. You don't solve CSAM with legislation. You don't solve CSAM by banning encryption.

You solve CSAM by giving money to law enforcement to go after CSAM.

But, see, the entities pushing these laws don't actually care about CSAM.

“Their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs” sounds awfully similar to what I’m saying. Maybe “don’t care” is a little too absolute, but it doesn’t make much difference if they don’t care or if they care but their priority is still keeping their jobs.