Suchergebnisse

Taking a multidisciplinary approach that they identify as a "cyber-realist research agenda," the contributors to this volume examine the prospects for electronic democracy in terms of its form and practice--while avoiding the pitfall of treating the benefits of electronic democracy as being self-evident. The debates question what electronic democracy needs to accomplish in order to revitalize democracy and what the current state of electronic democracy can teach us about the challenges and opportunities for implementing democratic technology initiatives.

While the formal legal protection of anonymity appears at an all-time high, developments in both the public and private sec­tor show a growing number of legal and especially technical means to undermine it. The growing interest of people in using the Internet has had a key im­pact on the worldwide availability of personal information. Technological advances provide numerous opportunities to trace and track people down by companies interested in monetizing personal information. Measures such as the US Patriot Act, the European Cybercrime Convention and the European Union rules on data retention demonstrate that the exercise of the right to the anonymous exchange of information is under substantial pressure from governments. These developments have fueled the debates about how, by whom, and to what extent cyberspace anonymity should be controlled.

National identification ("ID") cards appear increasingly inevitable. National ID cards have the potential to be repressive and privacy destroying, but it is also possible to design a system that captures more benefits than costs. Because the United States currently lacks a single, reliable credential, private businesses have trouble authenticating their customers and matching data among distributed databases. This Article argues that the desire for reliable ID creates a window of opportunity for the federal government to strike a bargain: offer private businesses the use of a reliable credential in the form of a national ID card, on the condition that they abide by a privacy standard set and owned by the United States. But the government must act quickly-the Real ID Act of 2005, which sets up a national standard for the issuance of state driver's licenses, is poised to become effective in May 2008. This law does not provide for privacy protections, and once it goes into effect the opportunity to leverage such protections on a national ID card will be greatly reduced.

In this Response to the preceding article by Joe Sims and Cynthia Bauerly, A. Michael Froomkin defends his earlier critique of ICANN. This Response first summarizes the arguments in Wrong Turn In Cyberspace, which explained why ICANN lacks procedural and substantive legitimacy. This Response focuses on how the U.S. government continues to assert control over the domain name system, and how this control violates the APA, the nondelegation doctrine as articulated by the Supreme Court in Carter Coal, and public policy. Professor Froomkin then proposes that ICANN's role be more narrowly focused away from policy making towards true standard-making and technical coordination.

An outstanding line-up of contributors explore the regulation of the internet from an interdisciplinary perspective. In-depth coverage of this controversial area such as international political economy, law, politics, economics, sociology and internet regulation. Regulating the Global Information Society covers the differences between both US and UK approaches to regulation and establishes where policy is being made that will influence the future direction of the global information society, from commercial, democratic and middle-ground perspectives.

The rapid deployment of privacy-destroying technologies by governments and businesses threatens to make informational privacy obsolete. The first part of this article describes a range of current technologies to which the law has yet to respond effectively. These include: routine collection of transactional data, growing automated surveillance in public places, deployment of facial recognition technology and other biometrics, cell-phone tracking, vehicle tracking, satellite monitoring, workplace surveillance, Internet tracking from cookies to "clicktrails", hardware-based identifiers, intellectual property-protecting "snitchware," and sense-enhanced searches that allow observers to see through everything from walls to clothes. The cumulative and reinforcing effect of these technologies may make modern life completely visible and permeable to observers; there could be nowhere to hide. The second part of this article discusses leading attempts to craft legal responses to the assault on privacy including self-regulation, privacy-enhancing technologies, data-protection law, and property-rights based solutions-in the context of three structural obstacles to privacy enhancement: consumers 'privacy myopia; important First Amendment protection of rights to collect and repeat information; and fear of what other people may do if not monitored. The article concludes that despite the warnings of information privacy pessimists, all is not lost -yet.

The Internet relies on an underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name system (DNS) to control the routing for the vast majority of Internet traffic. At its heart is a single data file, known as the "root." Control of the root provides singular power in cyberspace. This Article first describes how the United States government found itself in control of the root. It then describes how, in an attempt to meet concerns that the United States could so dominate an Internet chokepoint, the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) summoned into being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a formally private nonprofit California corporation. DoC then signed contracts with ICANN in order to clothe it with most of the U.S. government's power over the DNS, and convinced other parties to recognize ICANN's authority. ICANN then took regulatory actions that the U.S. Department of Commerce was unable or unwilling to make itself, including the imposition on all registrants of Internet addresses of an idiosyncratic set of arbitration rules and procedures that benefit third-party trademark holders. Professor Froomkin then argues that the use of ICANN to regulate in the stead of an executive agency violates fundamental values and policies designed to ensure democratic control over the use of government power, and sets a precedent that risks being expanded into other regulatory activities. He argues that DoC's use of ICANN to make rules either violates the APA's requirement for notice and comment in rulemaking and judicial review, or it violates the Constitution's nondelegation doctrine. Professor Froomkin reviews possible alternatives to ICANN, and ultimately proposes a decentralized structure in which the namespace of the DNS is spread out over a transnational group of "policy partners" with DoC.

The Magaziner Report focuses on achieving short-term goals without giving sufficient consideration to long-term consequences affecting the structure of Internet governance and democracy in general. This overly pragmatic approach creates a paradoxical climate: overly-friendly to government intervention (in e-commerce regulation) while also overly willing to defer to privatized governance structures (in other areas). As the recent World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") domain name/trademark process demonstrates, certain Internet governance processes raise several questions, not least discerning whether such processes include adequate notice and consultation. More traditional democratic processes, such as legislation and regulation, have routinized means of giving affected parties notice of pending decisions and of soliciting public comment. Other privatized governance processes may be equally or more legitimate, but not inevitably.