Reading this article got me thinking. After the Arab spring, UK riots and worldwide massive corporate and government hacking and massive privacy violations, is it high time that there be a regulation of the entire internet infrastructure? If so then how? And who?
Given the publicized, fast changing character of the web, will it be government lead, with a top down hierarchical approach? Or a collaborative slant ala open source will be more appropriate, giving the people equal footing in internet regulatory resolutions.
With the continuous rise of social media, further ignited by tech giants adding the social tastes to their web technologies, one can only wonder where the road may take us. The governmental approach is pretty good, if only each country could agree to a single, reasonable regulation which I think, is highly unlikely, given the different cultures and perspective of each country (think Arab Spring and UK riots, will the positive and negatively affected country agree on the same rule? Likely but still complicated). And the second one, the people collaborating approach, can be pretty messy, given the millions of voices on the web, no one can possibly vote off and agree to a single resolution. But if we do, then just like any successful open source project, it could be beautiful.
Disorganization and chaos is inherent on the web, we still have a lot of road to take before we can get to a single-minded perspective. But if we stop and fail to come up with something, anything to patch these up, problems may come up and we won’t have the power to stop it. I fear for that day.
Photo: By Anders Ljungberg via Flickr under a creative commons license