Didn't they try to do that with 1984's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
Believe it or not but CFAA would likely have not come about if not for the classic film "WarGames" [1].
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=7rBLCZuEOswC&pg=PA38&lpg=P...
About as well as Korea's government picking the crypto businesses should use in 1996:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...
You mean like everyone who's talking about AI policy right now?
I think though that the number of people with that kind of vision and foresight are few.
It also often comes from domain experts, and almost never from politicians.
I have a friend who participates in superforecasting. I should pay more attention.
Tragedy of the commons issues are ones that often largely too late to easily solve by the time enough public pressure has built up to force legislative oversight. Social injustice issues are the same.
That being said, I agree that overzealous legislators making pot shots at potential issues is not a good solution either. My thought would be meet halfway with predictive laws with sunset clauses? That way, if a mistake is made, it will be undone in a predictable timescale without the need to get an oft deadlocked congress to take action.
As for the tragedy of the commons, if your mining operation negatively impacts mine by messing up a shared resource, I can sue you right away. The lack of a legal framework doesn't mean that everything is legal, at least under US tradition; it means that the civil courts decide.
This is only true though for direct damages that ideally are measurable in a monetary value. Are there cases where it helped keeping goods in the commons. I for one would love to sue everyone who fishes in the ocean because I'd rather watch the fish and sleep well at night knowing the ocean isn't being ruined. Simpler and less controversial example would be pollution of the air we are all breathing.
But it’s not the only legal concept, nor the most dominant or best, and in civil law systems, it’s required that all law be available and readable for free for the public, which means law has to be written into laws, and can’t be defined through court rulings.
Another question is: why should the US decide what happens in space? That’s quite an imperialistic view on the world.
That's not really imperialism, just a matter of responsibility. Clearly the US and any other space going nation should be held responsible for the activities of it's citizens and enterprises in space as elsewhere, and has responsibilities towards them as well.
Where that line of reasoning reaches the end of it's tether is when we come to consider property rights over pre-existing assets and territory in space.
Personally, I think land ownership claims around unmanned probes, rovers, and stationary facilities should be kept small, and claims around manned homesteads should not be more than about a mile radius or so, probably less. In the beginning, I think it's good to have policies that encourage settlements with different owners to be located close together, without anyone becoming a real-estate baron. The best land should go to those who have the ability to actually use it, not real-estate speculators.
See also: https://xkcd.com/2125/ as an example of how land claims shouldn't work.
Step 0: Which ones? US judges? Chinese judges? Maybe Saudi ones?
Time to churn out those cornucopia machines.
Could you imagine how bad it would be if Congress got excited about the potential for internet crime in 1985, tried to guess the form of the problems that would arise, and then wrote laws banning and permitting things that they thought would lead to trouble? There is no way somebody back then could predict which situations would lead to trouble decades later.
The best way to deal with space would probably be to let judges stretch earth law (property rights, whatever) to produce as much justice as possible, and then modifying the laws once the lessons had been borne out.