> it seems that they would have to know

You'd think they would have to know what a browser is. Certainly some people within the courts and legislative bodies do. But, I challenge the "have to," because I want to give credence to my anecdotal theory that a ton of people have no idea, especially older people, and most politicians are super old. Why do they "have to?" Couldn't a lot of boneheaded decisions we've seen over the years be because they don't understand? They could maliciously be applying law per their lobbyist needs, which is probably a thing that happens, but they also could just be ignorant.

Remember "series of tubes?" What about David Cameron's push in 2014 to "protect kids from porn" that was really just a PRC style great firewall? Pretend it wasn't a malicious attempt at massive state surveillance - how does it stop kids from getting porn from Twitter, Youtube? Anybody with a glancing familiarity with the internet would know why stopping porn is essentially impossible without blocking literally EVERYTHING and creating a country intranet, combined with a massive, pervasive state surveillance operation with police that have broad powers. Impossible in a liberal democracy (the effective porn blocking, not the attempts to have pervasive state surveillance - the issues come when it's time to start arresting).

Some quotes from when Zuckerberg was in front of congress:

"If I’m emailing within WhatsApp … does that inform your advertisers?" Senator Brian Schatz

"What was Facemash?" Senator Billy Long

"How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?" Orrin Hatch (the "senator... we run ads" quote)

Why are so many politicians opposed to encryption? Because they're fascists that want better state surveillance? Maybe, but I think more likely is they hear that it makes it harder for the FBI to track down two murderers in San Bernadino and they think "Encryption? Affecting law enforcement? Do we need it? Just make it illegal."

Tangent: This makes me wonder about a broader topic I've been questioning: I think we assign too much competence and reasoning to eachother and to our leaders. Random examples: Musk put a big flashing X on the roof of the twitter offices, it's obviously against code, it's obviously horrible, but there are people arguing "Genius marketing move! No press is bad press!" Really? Or, when Bezos climbed into a rocket. "He wouldn't get into it if he wasn't sure it was mostly safe. You don't get to be a billionaire without knowing what you're doing." A couple years later and a submarine that the most layperson of laypeople would point out is a deathtrap proves that idea wrong.

This on top of the fact that sometimes it seems like entire financial markets depend on people making "rational" decisions. A housing crash because "the banks would never maintain these portfolios as AA if they weren't rock-solid!" A dot-com crash because "www is the future, it'll make money somehow!" It keeps happening. We keep giving ourselves way too much credit. I think climate change is going to be the greatest example of this, should we survive it. "We'll let it go far, but not past a certain point. Someone will stop this before it's actually irreversible. Or if necessary, at some point, the people will rise up and destroy oil pipelines." No, I don't think so, I think we'll keep thinking we're too smart to let something like that happen.