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Comment by meshaneian | Hacker News Reader

In general "should" is a recommendation, not a requirement.

    "shall" indicates a requirement
    "should" indicates a recommendation
    "may" is used to indicate that something is permitted
    "can" is used to indicate that something is possible, for example, that an organization or individual is able to do something

https://www.iso.org/foreword-supplementary-information.html

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

Additionally, your suggestion of "must" has valid reasons for being preferred in contracts over "shall":

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/conversational/shal...

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If you don't mind me asking, what's the point of "should"? Usually anything that is not a hard requirement is promptly ignored, so I'm not clear why is time devoted to create "should" statements.

The way they've framed this is not that it's a new rule, but rather, a statement as to how they intend to enforce the existing rules that are already on the books, and a "recommendation" to regulated entities as to what actions they should/shouldn't take in order to not suffer negative enforcement consequences (in other words, it's not "the rule is now that you must do this," but rather "just FYI, our interpretation of current rules/statutes/whatever is that behavior X is already prohibited, so if you don't want to get in trouble with us for failing to comply, you really ought to do this").

This is advantageous to the agency if they can get away with it because new rulemaking involves a bunch of extra, lengthy process under the Administrative Procedures Act (they have to publish a bunch of drafts and collect public comments on them, then address any substantive comments they receive, etc.).

Should allows for someone who has a real exception that we can't even think of to explain themselves. Maybe such a thing doesn't exist, I can't think of it. But just in case you have an out.

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