How do federal laws regarding the internet related to complex concepts like cybersecurity get passed? How do lawmakers with little working knowledge of the web get the time to discern all the details in all the bills for those laws?
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Haphazardly.
Congress has committees that have meetings with “experts”. Sometimes these are people with universities, sometimes they’re people who work in a particular industry. This has the advantage that those folks definitely know more about the subject than the people in Congress. It has the disadvantage that you’re basically asking the people who run the industry to make their own laws.
The other method is to pass a broad law and grant authority to an administrative agency. You can create something like the Environmental Protection Agency, and then pass the Clean Air Act. And in the law you say “the EPA has the authority to create regulations to limit the amount of XYZ particles in the air”. You can do the same thing with cybersecurity. And you just push the responsibility on whoever gets appointed to run that agency.
Part of the reason the US President has become as powerful a position as it has, is because the President appoints the leaders of all those administrative agencies. For decades, Congress has invested a lot of their own decision making authority with those agencies. So whoever is in the White House gets to hand-pick who runs the agencies, and decide what regulations they want to create or eliminate.
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