Abstract: This essay steps back from the more detailed regulatory discussions in other contributions to this roundtable on "Competing Visions for Cyberspace" and highlights three broad issues that raise ethical concerns about our activity online. First, the commodification of people—their identities, their data, their privacy—that lies at the heart of business models of many of the largest information and communication technologies companies risks instrumentalizing human beings. Second, concentrations of wealth and market power online may be contributing to economic inequalities and other forms of domination. Third, long-standing tensions between the security of states and the human security of people in those states have not been at all resolved online and deserve attention.
Keywords: cyberspace, ethics, data stewardship, economic inequality, human security, national security, sovereignty
The full roundtable essay is available to subscribers only. Click here for access.
More in this issue
Winter 2018 (32.4) • Review
Justice and Natural Resources: An Egalitarian Theory, by Chris Armstrong
Chris Armstrong defends a straightforward and highly plausible thesis: that the benefits and burdens associated with natural resources should be distributed so as to reduce ...
Winter 2018 (32.4) • Feature
Reforming the Security Council through a Code of Conduct: A Sisyphean Task?
In this feature, Bolarinwa Adediran disputes the utility of a code of conduct to regulate the exercise of the veto at the UN Security Council ...
Winter 2018 (32.4) • Review
Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice, by Brooke A. Ackerly
This book offers a clear argument for assuming political responsibility toward basic structures of injustice in the developing world.