Winter 2018 (32.4) Essay

Promoting Economic Prosperity in Cyberspace

Abstract: Unique among major communications media, the Internet has delivered vast public benefit while being designed, developed, and deployed largely through private initiative and nongovernmental funding. At the same time, key public policy decisions were made early on that established the legal and regulatory foundations necessary for economic innovation and free expression to flourish. Those foundations include strong free speech protections, liability limits on Internet platforms, protections against excessive government surveillance, open technical standards, individual privacy protection, and some form of net neutrality. Those foundations were laid when the Internet was young. As part of a roundtable on "Competing Visions for Cyberspace," this essay argues that as the business, social, and technical impact of the Internet has become clearer globally, some of these principles require adjustment, but all will remain important if we are to preserve the economic potential of the Internet environment going forward.

Keywords: Internet policy, privacy, free flow of information, economic innovation, free speech, net neutrality, economics, cyberspace

The full roundtable essay is available to subscribers only. Click here for access.

More in this issue

Winter 2018 (32.4) Review Essay

Human Rights Under Attack: What Comes Next?

Micheline Ishay laments the recent onslaught against the human rights movement even from professed supporters, taking Samuel Moyn’s recent book Not Enough as indicative ...

Winter 2018 (32.4) Essay

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy: Progress and Challenges

In this essay, Ş. İlgü Özler examines global progress toward achieving the ideals enshrined in the UDHR, which was adopted seventy years ago in 1948.

Winter 2018 (32.4) Essay

What if Cyberspace Were for Fighting?

This essay explores the ethical and legal implications of prioritizing cyberspace as a warfighting domain. The authors envision a world where states take on a ...