continued from yesterday…
Governing the Internet is not simply a process of guiding the behaviour of individual users however. The tremendous pervasiveness of business and the government must also be considered. It is only appropriate that law and the market best regulate these two interests. The government’s ability to search and monitor is best combated through extending existing constitutional protections (and expanding them where they are lacking) to privacy online. In the same way that the home is inviolate except in cases of reasonable suspicion online exchanges must be formulated so that the point of origin; the user, becomes the medium of exchange rather than the technology that facilitates it, therefore the same individual rights that extend to that person must extend to the exchange itself.
How then do we regulate business interests online when a system of liberty and personal responsibility prevail? First and foremost advertising online must be exempted from the tax-free status that traditional advertising enjoys. Once advertising is susceptible to the same market forces as all other transactions online it quickly becomes prudent for those who use advertising to find alternate sources of revenue. This will in turn force those who sell advertising to compete in a market where consumers (through their participation in advertising-sponsored sites) determine how advertising should be presented. The more nefarious encroachments of business through monitoring and privacy invasion are combated in much the same way. Although architecture is necessary to prevent nefarious and malicious penetrations of users, the market coupled with a re-coding will again effectively combat privacy exploitation. By simply rewriting the code so that all access is identified (since actual access if free) through a trusted system where teh access is open but the connection is first identified and resolved to an identity; business loses any clandestine initiative it would have, and decisions to operate aggressively would have to be weighed against the response of users.
It can be said that the greatest liability of neo-liberal thought is that it ignores difference of circumstance and resource. In the world of the Internet differences of circumstance are almost completely irrelevant. When identity is protected by anonymity, and the advantage of access is restricted by the architecture, these liabilities can be ignored as well. Lessig correctly asserts that the Internet will be regulated, and that it therefore must be regulated. It is through the security of the architecture of two-way freedom of exchange that the most reliable form of regulation can emerge; one where individuals are responsible for their own activity, protected from the maliciousness of others by social norms, safe from government intervention through constitutional or legal protections and freed by the market to choose how they interact with business.
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