Re: Proposed Text for Local Law and Public Purpose

Chris, 

I would say that you profoundly misunderstand what I was saying. 

1/ No, DNT is not a law, but those who will use it are embedded in 
their respective legal systems. 

2/ No, W3C is not a self-regulatory body. It is a Specification 
Developing Organization (SDO). Between the Specification and its 
given value in a given legal system, there is one further step where 
W3C has no influence whatsoever. This step is the implementation of 
the Specification. I would love to be able to make mandatory 
Specifications. All the world would be XHTML2. Unfortunately, the 
world has decided otherwise. This example may tell you that even if 
we all agree here and everything is charming and we all really like 
what we see, there is no guarantee that people will take it up large 
scale on a global basis. On this last step, we have only a very 
limited influence (we can try to encourage people to implement).

3/ No, W3C is not a legislative body, but it can't prevent 
legislators to make its Specifications mandatory. Some of this is 
e.g. happening in other areas, but not in Privacy. Again, we have 
only very very limited influence on that step. We can neither force 
nor prevent it. 

4/ Can you explain what you mean by "DNT law"?

5/ I was just pointing out undesirable effects of Amy's proposal on 
the expected functioning and balance of the DNT system and how this 
is embedded into certain legal systems. I'm not a full proof common 
law lawyer, so I don't know how contracts between two parties to the 
detriment of a third party are handled in those systems. 

6/ I fully understand that DNT leading to violation of contractual 
obligations is an issue. But I also understand that this is an issue 
for transition and implementation and that we should discuss the 
contractual obligation issues under this topic. It has nothing to do 
with Amy's text. Amy's text is on the predominance of law over DNT. 
But law is one thing, contractual obligations are party specific and 
thus can't overturn. If you have obliged yourself to track all users 
of a given site regardless, you simply can't send "1" or "3" back 
because you can't implement DNT.

Is that clearing the misunderstanding? If not, I welcome further 
specific questions. 

Rigo

On Wednesday 24 October 2012 16:11:17 Chris Mejia wrote:
> Rigo, where is DNT a "law"?  Frankly, I'm very confused by your
> statement below... I thought the W3C was a self-regulatory body
> that creates voluntary specifications, not a legislative body,
> creating prescriptive laws.  Am I wrong?  If we are creating the
> "DNT law", that's certainly news to me.

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2012 16:28:55 UTC