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 authority1

Brief History of the Internet

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

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Brief History continued

• 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

3

Brief History continued• 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%)

• View Youtube videos – “Did You Know” 3.0 and 4.0

4

Internet’s Architecture• 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

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What Routers Do

• 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

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Important Characteristics of the Internet

1. Openness – main strength, users become producers of technology

2. Asynchronous – no need for coordination between sender and receiver

3. Permits many-to-many format of coordination

4. Distributed format where data can take many routes to it destination

Because it is a decentralized packet-based network it is difficult to censor

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World Wide Web

• Contributed to Internet’s 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

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Electronic Commerce

• Trade that occurs on the Internet• Benefits

1. Browse and shop anytime2. Low-cost/overhead for the business3. Ability to advertize to each individual customer

• 4 digital business models– B2C - Amazon– C2B - Priceline– B2B – ecommerce between 2 businesses– C2C - eBay

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

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Social Networking

• Web has new façade 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

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Social Networking

• 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

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Social Networking

• 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

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Social Networking

• 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 person’s 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

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Social Networking

• 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

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Social Networking• Same factors that make social networking sites

popular also make them difficult to control– Challenge to guard against illegal activities

• Sexting• Dissemination 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

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Social Problems and Costs

• E-commerce –vendors and consumers are victimized by fraud and attacks by hackers

• Lessig doesn’t 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

• 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 top-down approach?

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Internet Governance

• 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

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Domain Names

• Domain names introduced to maintain some order (6 originally)– .com– .net– .org– .edu– .gov– .mil

• ICANN recently created several new ones– .aero– .coop– .biz– .name– .info– pro

20Cybersquatting issues are covered in Chapter 4

Internet Regulation and Ethics

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

– Countries?

• Do we use:– Laws– Code– The marketplace– Norms

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