New Rules

I haven't followed men's soccer since I was a kid. The sport has become virtually unwatchable in my opinion. Seeing players fall over at the slightest (even imaginary) touch, waste time so obnoxiously when they're ahead, and, worst of all, show aggression to officials is beneath unedifying. Why can't the sport endow officials with the kind of power rugby does?

This might sound odd to anyone who doesn't watch rugby, but the biggest name in the sport's history isn't the legendary player Jonah Lomu, but Nigel Owens, a Welsh referee. Every referee in rugby is exceptional — they keep almost four metric tonnes of muscle from tearing each other to pieces over eighty minutes of full-contact (you wonder how deaths are so rare. But Nigel Owens was something else. He commanded respect from the players on the field, and in most cases earned their affection, too. I'm talking in the past tense due to his retirement — he's still with us. The only question is: Why no British government has made him a Lord?

In rugby, officials are the law. Even in cases where they blunder — as all humans do — their decisions stand unless overturned by other officials. Players don't get a say. This is partly facilitated by the nature of rugby's rules. In soccer, if you're knocked to the ground by an opposing player, you'll probably be awarded something for having been hard done by (hence the players falling over so often). In rugby, you're more likely to be penalized for lacking the strength to stay standing.

Rules work when they: a) make sense; b) avoid creating perverse incentives; and c) are enforced by respected people. Lawmakers could learn from rugby.

Perhaps the most comically ridiculous law that people in tech put up with is the EU’s Cookie Law. This isn’t actually a law in itself, but something incorporated into various other legislation (including, still, Britain’s). It’s the reason we all have to accept or decline cookies in a pop-up box before we’re allowed to view websites.

Hand on heart, the intent behind the Cookie Law is a good one — it aims to give web users control over who can track them. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the fact that the biggest of big tech (along with a great many smaller players) like to follow us around the web. The simplest way of doing this is to install little bits of code — called “tracking cookies” — on our devices that relay lots of information about which websites we’re visiting. This is part of a Byzantine system the tech industry uses to build profiles of us, which are then used in targeted advertising. It’s all about money, of course, and doing everything to thwart it is a damned good idea.

Except the Cookie Law is rubbish. Its fundamental flaw is putting an onus on tech companies to inform uses about cookies, and gain user consent, on pain of fines being levied by governments. This makes no sense when most governments are struggling to rub two pennies together to make a third, and single tech companies have more cash on hand than the United States Treasury. David might have toppled Goliath, but that was once before the Bible was written. In the Millennia since, we’ve learned that money usually wins.

A much better alternative to the Cookie Law would be public awareness campaigns to inform web users that tracking cookies are always optional. Not only when a website chooses to give you control through an annoying pop-up (that most people just accept, anyway — hence tech not fighting the issue), but always. You can disable them in your browser by default.

I said this last week, and I’ll say it again — the key to tackling tech overreach is empowering people to defend themselves against it. Then again, men’s soccer is annoyingly popular, so maybe the public can’t be trusted?