  We consider large gauge transformations of gravity and electromagnetism in
D=4 asymptotically flat spacetime. Already at the classical level, we identify
a canonical transformation that decouples the soft variables from the hard
dynamics. We find that only the soft dynamics is constrained by BMS or large
U(1) charge conservation. Physically this corresponds to the fact that
sufficiently long-wavelength photons or gravitons that are added to the
in-state will simply pass through the interaction region; they scatter
trivially in their own sector. This implies in particular that the large gauge
symmetries bear no relevance to the black hole information paradox. We also
present the quantum version of soft decoupling. As a consistency check, we show
that the apparent mixing of soft and hard modes in the original variables
arises entirely from the long range field of the hard charges, which is fixed
by gauge invariance and so contains no additional information.
