The regulated end of internet law, and the return to computer and information law?

The 2020s will finally be the decade of cyberlaw, not as ‘Law of the Horse’, but as digital natives finally help bring the law syllabus, legal practice and even legislatures into the Information Society. In the first part of the chapter, I explain how the cyberlawyers of the 1990s dealt with regulation of the then novel features of the public Internet. Internet law was a subject of much interest in the 1990s in the US, and some specialist interest in UK and Europe. In Part 2, I explain the foundational rules for the adaptation of liability online initially focussed on absolving intermediaries of legal responsibility for end user posted content. This exceptionalist approach gradually gave way. While some US authors are hamstrung by a faith in the myth of the superuser and somewhat benign intentions of corporations as opposed to federal and state government, there has been a gradual convergence on the role of regulated self-regulation (or co-regulation) on both sides of the Atlantic. In Part 3, I argue that the use of co-regulation has been fundamentally embedded since European nations began to enforce these rules, with limited enforcement in which judges and regulators stated that business models largely focussed on encouraging illegal posting would not be protected. Settled policy on liability, privacy, trust, encryption, open Internet policies against filtering, were arrived at as a result of expert testimony and exhaustive hearings. In the final Part 4, I argue that hanging those policies on a whim results in potentially catastrophic results in terms of untying the Gordian knots of intermediary safe harbour/harbor, privacy, copyright enforcement, and open Internet European regulations

Privacy and Markets: A Love Story

After defining terms, Part I lays out the law and economics case against privacy, including its basis in economic thought more generally. Part II canvasses the literature responding to economic skepticism in the privacy law literature. Some scholars mount an insider critique, accepting the basic tenets of economics but suggesting that privacy actually increases efficiency in some contexts, or else noting that markets themselves will yield privacy under the right conditions. Others critique economic thinking from the outside. Markets “unravel” privacy by penalizing it, degrade privacy by treating it as just another commodity, or otherwise interfere with the values or processes that privacy exists to preserve. Part III tells the love story from the Article’s title. I develop here a novel account of the relationship between privacy and markets, positioning the two concepts as sympathetic instead of antithetical. Neither insider nor outsider, the framework understands privacy as a crucial ingredient of the market mechanism, while simultaneously demonstrating how markets enable privacy to achieve its most important functions. It turns out opposites attract, just as Hollywood has been telling us all along. The final Part discusses what’s at stake. First, at the descriptive level, this Article sheds light on certain institutional puzzles such as why the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC” or “the Commission”)—an agency dedicated to free markets and brimming with economists—would arise as the de facto privacy authority for the United States. The Article’s framework not only explains and perhaps justifies the FTC’s role in policing privacy, but also predicts other agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will increasingly become involved in privacy enforcement. Second, at the level of discourse, the Article opens up new avenues of analytic inquiry, previously obscured by a mutual skepticism. In particular, the framework helps surface the role of privacy in avoiding market discrimination for the simple reason that it hides many objects of potential bias. And third, normatively, this Article argues in support of laws and policies, such as conditioning access to political databases on non-commercial use, that try to keep personal information out of markets

Library Trends 46 (1) Summer 1997: Buildings, Books, and Bytes

published or submitted for publicatio

The Internet is a Semicommons

The Internet is a semicommons. Private property in servers and network links coexists with a shared communications platform. This distinctive combination both explains the Internet\u27s enormous success and illustrates some of its recurring problems. Building on Henry Smith\u27s theory of the semicommons in the medieval open-field system, this essay explains how the dynamic interplay between private and common uses on the Internet enables it to facilitate worldwide sharing and collaboration without collapsing under the strain of misuse. It shows that key technical features of the Internet, such as its layering of protocols and the Web\u27s division into distinct sites, respond to the characteristic threats of strategic behavior in a semicommons. An extended case study of the Usenet distributed messaging system shows that not all semicommons on the Internet succeed; the continued success of the Internet depends on our ability to create strong online communities that can manage and defend the infrastructure on which they rely. Private and common both have essential roles to play in that task, a lesson recognized in David Post\u27s and Jonathan Zittrain\u27s recent books on the Internet

The Impact of Technology on Consumerism

E-commerce is shifting the way people purchase their goods and services and affecting the relationship between technology and society. Consequently, traditional retailers, aware of the inevitable change, have developed strategies to keep up with the continuously evolving marketplace. These strategies vary from creating virtual stores (i.e., websites) and developing digital social networks to data mining and spamming. Therefore, from a historical point of view, this thesis will analyze the impact of technology on commerce and how the creation of new virtual marketplaces had affected consumers\u27 behavior. This thesis will explore the origins of e-commerce, the technologies that made possible its development, and who are some of the most influential entrepreneurs in the online retail business. Further, I will analyze how data mining has affected society\u27s notion of personal information and privacy

Economic issues in distributed computing

textOn the Internet, one of the essential characteristics of electronic commerce is the integration of large-scale computer networks and business practices. Commercial servers are connected through open and complex communication technologies, and online consumers access the services with virtually unpredictable behavior. Both of them as well as the e-Commerce infrastructure are vulnerable to cyber attacks. Among the various network security problems, the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is a unique example to illustrate the risk of commercial network applications. Using a massive junk traffic, literally anyone on the Internet can launch a DDoS attack to flood and shutdown an eCommerce website. Cooperative technological solutions for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are already available, yet organizations in the best position to implement them lack incentive to do so, and the victims of DDoS attacks cannot find effective methods to motivate the organizations. Chapter 1 discusses two components of the technological solutions to DDoS attacks: cooperative filtering and cooperative traffic smoothing by caching, and then analyzes the broken incentive chain in each of these technological solutions. As a remedy, I propose usage-based pricing and Capacity Provision Networks, which enable victims to disseminate enough incentive along attack paths to stimulate cooperation against DDoS attacks. Chapter 2 addresses possible Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks toward the wireless Internet including the Wireless Extended Internet, the Wireless Portal Network, and the Wireless Ad Hoc network. I propose a conceptual model for defending against DDoS attacks on the wireless Internet, which incorporates both cooperative technological solutions and economic incentive mechanisms built on usage-based fees. Cost-effectiveness is also addressed through an illustrative implementation scheme using Policy Based Networking (PBN). By investigating both technological and economic difficulties in defense of DDoS attacks which have plagued the wired Internet, our aim here is to foster further development of wireless Internet infrastructure as a more secure and efficient platform for mobile commerce. To avoid centralized resources and performance bottlenecks, online peer-to-peer communities and online social network have become increasingly popular. In particular, the recent boost of online peer-to-peer communities has led to exponential growth in sharing of user-contributed content which has brought profound changes to business and economic practices. Understanding the dynamics and sustainability of such peer-to-peer communities has important implications for business managers. In Chapter 3, I explore the structure of online sharing communities from a dynamic process perspective. I build an evolutionary game model to capture the dynamics of online peer-to-peer communities. Using online music sharing data collected from one of the IRC Channels for over five years, I empirically investigate the model which underlies the dynamics of the music sharing community. Our empirical results show strong support for the evolutionary process of the community. I find that the two major parties in the community, namely sharers and downloaders, are influencing each other in their dynamics of evolvement in the community. These dynamics reveal the mechanism through which peer-to-peer communities sustain and thrive in a constant changing environment.Information, Risk, and Operations Management (IROM

Digital Market Manipulation

In 1999, Jon Hanson and Douglas Kysar coined the term “market manipulation” to describe how companies exploit the cognitive limitations of consumers. For example, everything costs $9.99 because consumers see the price as closer to$9 than $10. Although widely cited by academics, the concept of market manipulation has had only a modest impact on consumer protection law. This Article demonstrates that the concept of market manipulation is descriptively and theoretically incomplete, and updates the framework of the theory to account for the realities of a marketplace that is mediated by technology. Today’s companies fastidiously study consumers and, increasingly, personalize every aspect of the consumer experience. Furthermore, rather than waiting for the consumer to approach the marketplace, companies can reach consumers anytime and anywhere. The result of these and related trends is that firms can not only take advantage of a general understanding of cognitive limitations, but can uncover, and even trigger, consumer frailty at an individual level. A new theory of digital market manipulation reveals the limits of consumer protection law and exposes concrete economic and privacy harms that regulators will be hard-pressed to ignore. This Article thus both meaningfully advances the behavioral law and economics literature and harnesses that literature to explore and address an impending sea change in the way firms use data to persuade