Rules and Regulations - should there be set standards for SEO?

Data Protection Act 1998. W3C Web Compliant Standards. The Bible. All of these important things have one thing in a common; a code of practise. So why can't we implement rules and regulations for SEO as it is an ever increasing need for business's on the web? As trends change it might eventually happen but for now the big search engines such as Google, yahoo and msn hold the cards and each have a particularly big chip stack, especially Google. Only the search engine can define what the search engine wants. And they will never do this precisely as they are worried that SEO's will work the algorithm's they have in place. This makes it virtually impossible to get a buy-in and will take a while before any code of conduct will be put in place.