Chapter 2 Regulating and Governing the Internet

Governing Cyberspace

Jonathan Katz it is the freest community in America How should it be governed or regulated?
Debates

over pornography Selling illegal drugs Web sites advocating illicit activities

Many users want tighter, centralized controls Some (libertarians) says the internet thrives because there is no central governing authority

Brief History of the Internet

3

Late 1950s US Department of Defense was concerned about need for survivable communications system 1961 Paul Baran developed packet switching (break message into fixed size packages labeled with source and destination address then passed from node to node in network) 1971 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) gave grants to universities and corporations to establish communications network

Brief History continued

4

Electronic Mail soon became another function Early 80s subdivided into ARPANET and Milnet; interaction between the 2 became known as the Internet Late 80s National Science Foundation linked research universities and government researchers using NSFNET (replaced ARPANET)

Brief History continued

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Early 90s the Internet became available to corporate users and e-mail providers In 1993 had 29% of Internet usage being corporate users Commercial use is now the majority Users of Internet
1983

500 2000 200 million 2005 1 billion (approx. 15% of world population) 2009 1.7 billion (approx. 25%)

Africa still lags behind rest of world in usage of internet

Internets Architecture
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Uses existing telephone network TCP/IP allows computers to communicate with each other IP establishes the unique numeric address

Explain nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn (0-255)

TCP enables communications, breaks data into packets Routers use IP address to determine how to send the packet and to where

What Routers Do
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When packet arrives at router, the router looks at IP address to see if knows where to send it by looking at its routing table
If

it exists in the table it knows where to send it If not, it sends it along a default path to the next router in the backbone hierarchy

Important Characteristics of the Internet

1. 2.

3. 4.

Openness main strength, users become producers of technology Asynchronous no need for coordination between sender and receiver Permits many-to-many format of coordination Distributed format where data can take many routes to it destination
Because it is a decentralized packet-based network it is difficult to censor

5.

Highly scalable not directly affected when new computer links are added/deleted.

World Wide Web

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Contributed to Internets popularity Collection of multimedia documents that can be easily accessed HTML and use of tags to create documents Last 3 letters represent top level identification (.com .edu .gov) Hyperlinks link to other documents Servers store documents, video, music, etc Vast tangled network Search engines help locate information

Electronic Commerce
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Trade that occurs on the Internet Benefits

1. 2. 3.

Browse and shop anytime Low-cost/overhead for the business Ability to advertize to each individual customer B2C - Amazon C2B - Priceline B2B ecommerce between 2 businesses C2C - eBay

4 digital business models

11

Portal gateways to web, contains information like weather, stocks, news, sports, and links to many places

Social Networking
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Web has new faade thanks to social networking sites such as:
MySpace Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Users create their own personal space sharing personal data and allow friends and family to follow their life via postings

Social Networking
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MySpace
Began

in 2004 Based on features of predecessor called Friendster Pioneer in social networking Most popular social network in US Averages over 70 million unique visitors per month in 2009

Social Networking
14

Facebook

Began in 2004 Began an a social network exclusively for Harvard students Expanded to include all college and now anyone with an e-mail address Most formidable competitor to MySpace Fastest growing demographic -users older than 30 Most popular social network worldwide Averages over 275 million unique visitors per month in 2009

Social Networking
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LinkedIn
Began

in 2002 Social network for careers and colleagues

Twitter
Quickly

becoming social phenomenon Post short text messages known as tweets Read by anyone who subscribes to a persons twittering service Over 105 million registered users (April 2010) New users are signing up about 300,000 per day 180 million unique visitors per month

Social Networking
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Facebook and MySpace allow marketers to purchase targeted ads based on data shared by users Advertisements on Facebook page
Living

location Favorite Football Team Year graduated

Social Networking
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Same factors that make social networking sites popular also make them difficult to control
Challenge
Sexting Dissemination

to guard against illegal activities

of child pornography Protect users from online predators Cyberbullying

Communications

Decency Act gives online service providers fairly broad immunity from defamation and other offenses perpetrated by users

Social Problems and Costs

E-commerce vendors and consumers are victimized by fraud and attacks by hackers Lessig doesnt think law, the market, code, or social norms can fix these problems Spam uses resources Sale of personally identifiable data to a third party

Regulating
19

Spam who/what can stop it

The

marketplace Government Bottom-up approach shifting control from the state to the individual to filter
Lessig fears that

a school or workplace will use their standards on unsuspecting users

The question: Should control of the Internet be in the hands of private parties or should it be a topdown approach?

Internet Governance
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Must be bodies that maintain technical standards, domain names, and IP addresses 2 main policy groups
World

Wide Web Consortium - international standards setting body Internet Engineering Task Force develops technical standards such as protocols

ICANN governs Domain Name System

Domain Names
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Domain names introduced to maintain some order (6 originally)

.com .net

ICANN recently created several new ones

.aero .coop .biz

.org
.edu .gov .mil

.name
.info pro

Cybersquatting issues are covered in Chapter 4

Internet Regulation and Ethics

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Can we trust the Internet to regulate itself? Who maintains the level playing field?
Countries?

Do we use:
Laws Code The

marketplace Norms