problem arises when the method for achieving Judgement isn't codified.
Meaning, while laws and punishment are open to interpretation by the judges, the system by which we appoint judges, their permissions and abilities, are strictly codified, and they must be in order to subdue and reduce corruption.
OK: Your company decides to stop producing specific codified rules -- what is in place to prevent judgement bias and fair interpretation of 'crossing the line'?
The answer, in most cases, is that there is nothing to hold the 'judges' accountable. Nothing to insure fair unbiased decisions. Nothing to insure that they can't hold the position indefinitely without malice.
In other words : The shorter your Terms of Service become, the longer the Employee Handbook must become to prevent corruption and overall unfairness.
Besides that problem, there is the problem where the acceptable behaviors on a platform may wander with society -- this leads to issues where developers may be barred from a platform for behavior which was perfectly acceptable earlier that year without any real warning.
How does one avoid breaking rules if they can't know the rules?
Well, one might say "Play nice.", but the reality is that we all interpret it differently. That's one of the many nice features that comes along with codified law.
It can't be as unambiguous as code and usefully describe the world, but it shouldn't require judgment based on individual opinion - that's why the pornography ruling is such a dodge.
Judges should be disinterested and appealable; they are not in Apple's case.
And to add more complexity to the situation, laws and rules are but static snapshots within a dynamic system, and may simply drift away from intent with the progression of time and people's viewpoints. Kind of like a really old keyframe in a compressed video that starts smearing from the accumulation of too many changes.
And I think that's healthy. Laws are written for people, not computers, and as far as I can (I'm very much not a lawyer), everyone basically agrees on what "reasonable" means. Furthermore, I'm not sure what we'd do without that word, because you can't realistically outline every possible scenario in advance.
Yeah just to second this I think that a lot of us coming from software backgrounds like to think of laws as being code, fully definable, automatable and capable of covering all edge cases. This isn’t the case. Judgement is required.
Not to ruin my own metaphor but I actually think there is a lesson about software as well. Software is not something capable of perfection. There is no perfect code, everything is a bodge, some bodges are more useful than others. You can’t cover every edge case. Software evolves and has flaws much like the product of natural evolution.