[Free]

bluejak, on 2011-February-23, 11:18, said:

Your first point, about differences, has three answers.

Consider your example: Laws could be made to cover both alerting and self-alerting. Furthermore, areas that the authorities consider might have more than one approach could be covered by Regulation rather than Laws, compare rules for what to alert in F2F bridge. Furthermore, if a set of Laws was decided on and agreed I would expect OLB in future to follow it, so BBO, for example, would not introduce software that does not follow the Laws.

Obviously software could be called 'licensed' if they follow the Laws, but that doesn't mean a new company can't start an 'unlicensed' program to play online. Who's going to stop them? Many people wouldn't care that they don't follow the online Laws by the letter. So you'd reach a situation where people can choose to obey the laws or not.

bluejak, on 2011-February-23, 11:18, said:

Your second point, about ability to apply Laws, has two answers.

However difficult it is to apply the Laws online, that is no reason whatever not to make them. Fewer people cheat than you suppose: the world has not yet reached the situation where people expect to cheat. But if you do not create Laws, how does anyone know whether something is cheating or not? You need to set the rules so people know what they are required to do. Second, while cheating may be easy in some cases, it is not in others, and it is no reason not to set Laws.

Here we disagree completely. Laws should be logical (ok), but the governing body should be able penalize people breaking the rules. It's extremely hypothetical to consider cases where it's not easy to cheat while you're sitting at a computer/smartphone/ipad?/... which is online.
Compare it with spitting on the pavement: it's not allowed, but still lots of people do it. I've never heard of someone getting caught or having to pay a fine for such infraction. There's no purpose of such laws if nobody takes them into account and everybody does as they please.

[Vampyr]

Free, on 2011-February-24, 04:58, said:

Laws should be logical (ok), but the governing body should be able penalize people breaking the rules. It's extremely hypothetical to consider cases where it's not easy to cheat while you're sitting at a computer/smartphone/ipad?/... which is online.

This is a good point. But I think there have to be limits. For example, there is no way to detect, or penalise, partners speaking on the phone together while playing. One might say that this type of behaviour would be rare, because otherwise why bother playing, and that some other things, for instance seeing or being told about hands before playing them would be too much trouble to do on a regular basis. Still, these are examples of things that really have to be illegal if the game is to have any resemblance to bridge.

Perhaps resemblance to bridge is not a realistic goal, and maybe it is not really necessary.