New on Good crypto: FOCIL on Ethereum and legally credible neutrality
The debate over whether Ethereum's next major upgrade (Glamsterdam) should include fork‑choice enforced inclusion lists (FOCIL, EIP‑7805) has been framed primarily as an engineering and incentive‑design question. I want to reframe it as a legal‑design question:
What does FOCIL do to the distribution of practical discretion among base‑layer actors, and does that improve the case for what I have elsewhere called "legally credible neutrality"?
My short answer is yes—mostly. FOCIL converts what is today a fragile, norm‑based non-censorship aspiration into a protocol‑enforced constraint for most validators and proposers, which strengthens the argument that they should be treated in law as neutral infrastructure rather than as editors of user activity.
However, at the same time, FOCIL introduces a new locus of discretion in the inclusion‑list committee.