Faced with new laws in California and other states, big tech lobbyists want to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" to prevent "a compliance market where lawyers drive the decisions."

Faced with new laws in California and other states, big tech lobbyists want to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” to prevent “a compliance market where lawyers drive the decisions.”

  • @what_is_a_name
    2•1 year ago

    This article is such a mess. It just clobbers together talking points, speculation, and suspicion into a word salad

    The MOUs in the past were a marketing steps to prevent each state from inventing a new set of rules. It worked.

    Yeah - of course such “self regulation” is never as good as an advocate’s wet dream. Any law passed will also be bypassed. They will never try to build a taller wall. It’s in their business interest.

    But there is a legitimately win-win situation in a national MOU taking say the CA law and applying it nationally. If you at all feel the CA law is good, it will spread it to shit states that would never care about their citizens’ right to repair on their own.

    For the corps it is indeed a nightmare to let 50 states pass 50 different set of rules. The whole point of the IS market is that that does not happen. That there is one set of rules.

    But yeah. They will fight any law that is passed. Any MOU they sign will not be perfect. And of course before the ink is even dry on the MOU the corps will be working on ways to subvert and bypass it.

    PS: No MOU actually prevents states from passing new laws. It just tries to make a marketing claim “you do not have to spend effort on it- we are doing a good job already”. But that only lasts for as long as the MOU is not bypassed.