The libertarian case for safety regulations

[pktechgirlbackup]

I really, really want to play Anno 2070. It's a combination city builder/real time strategy set in Waterworld, and I love all of those things. The reviews are terrific. Unfortunately, it ships with horrible DRM. Not that they advertise that on the box, but it's published by Ubisoft, which is one of the worst publishers for restrictive, dangerous DRM, which I know because I spend about as much time studying the business of video games as I do actually playing them. But, there is hope! An earlier game in the series, Anno 1404/Dawn of Discovery, got even better reviews, and is old enough that it Ubisoft could have taken the malware out of it. 30 minutes of investigation later, I still can't tell if that's true.

It is almost certainly true that the physical disks now ship without DRM, but the physical disks only go up to Windows Vista, and I use 7. Amazon offers the game for download, but it is impossible to determine what DRM it has. Based on the comments, it definitely ships with a less restrictive form than it used to, but there is maybe still some? And it might still create vulnerabilities in my computer? I have no idea. I go to Ubisoft's website to investigate, where I find that Anno 1404 is too old for them to list it in their catalogue, but they do have a Deep Ocean expansion pack for Anno 2070. I'm a sucker for anything set in the deep ocean (fuck you, I loved Deep Blue Sea), so this just made me angrier.

So half an hour later I still don't know if I can safely install a game. I only got that far because I was waiting for my code to compile and I think this is kind of fun. If I had to do this for every game I bought, I'd buy substantially fewer games, which I assume game developers and publishers are against. You might expect me to make an anti-DRM argument from this, but everyone has already heard that. What I want to talk about is what this says about government intervention.

I was discussing libertarianism with a friend recently, and said that whatever the current ideal level of regulation (either through mandatory labeling, or outright banning or mandating certain things) was, the derivative was negative, because the internet made it easier to get the relevant information. She countered with "decision fatigue", and I had to concede the point. Not just because of the risk people will make the wrong decision while tired, but because of the heuristics they'll use instead. Faced with that many decisions, people will default to white lists (which is in fact what I do with Ubi games- I'll only buy them when they're on GOG.com, which is always and forever DRM free). Any new product/company/idea now has to prove that it's worth the investigation costs, which reduces innovation and privileges big companies over smaller ones. I like innovation and most of my policy positions depend on low-friction markets, so this is pretty bad for me. And there you have the libertarian argument for things like food safety regulations and building codes: the trust gained from them is a public good whose worth outweighs the cost.

Now, I think our current set of regulations has gone past the point where they are helpful. Keeping rat shit out of my food is great, I will determine if my beef stew is beefy enough, thank you. And this leaves me with concerns about regulatory agencies, such as "what happens when they solve the rat shit problem? Will they congratulate themselves and sign up for job training services, or will they start making up rules about insufficiently beefy beef stew? And despite being the motivating example, I don't think Congress understands video games enough to usefully regulate them. But clearly regulation has its uses.

Comments

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I have to say, working through the entirely-private PCI DSS SAQ is more painful than anything the various governments have made me do.