Cyber Law and Ethics

Regulation of the Connected World

Mark Grabowski, Eric P. Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000403183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

A primer on legal issues relating to cyberspace, this textbook introduces business, policy and ethical considerations raised by our use of information technology.

With a focus on the most significant issues impacting internet users and businesses in the United States of America, the book provides coverage of key topics such as social media, online privacy, artificial intelligence and cybercrime as well as emerging themes such as doxing, ransomware, revenge porn, data-mining, e-sports and fake news. The authors, experienced in journalism, technology and legal practice, provide readers with expert insights into the nuts and bolts of cyber law.

Cyber Law and Ethics: Regulation of the Connected World provides a practical presentation of legal principles, and is essential reading for non-specialist students dealing with the intersection of the internet and the law.

1 Origins of the Internet

When we look at the Internet, and where it came from, and where it’s arrived today, and where it’s headed, I think it’s quite clear that the engineers didn’t really realize just how much this was going to change things.

— Edward Snowden

Things were so different before the Internet that it’s inconceivable for today’s university students to appreciate how much the Internet transformed our existence.

Before we had things like social media and dating apps, meeting a new person happened organically: through our family, neighborhood, school or events. There were also clubs for everything: garden clubs, game clubs, clubs for collectors. They were a way for people to connect with others with similar interests. Communications occurred through letters, phone calls and in-person meetings, not e-mails, text messages or Zoom meetings.

If you wanted to meet up with a friend, there was no Skype or FaceTime: you had to make plans over landline telephones to rendezvous at a specific time and a precise location. If the person was outside your local calling area, it was a “toll call,” which could be expensive. Phones were strictly for talking and didn’t have contact lists, cameras or any other capabilities. Phone numbers needed to be memorized or looked up in a “phone book” which was often thick enough to double as a child’s booster seat. There was no GPS: either a paper map or handwritten directions were necessary to get to the meeting place. And you better not run late or get lost because there was no way to inform your friend to wait for you.

If you needed to buy something, you’d go to a store or the mall — there was no Amazon. If you couldn’t find what you were looking for, you ordered it from a catalog and would wait six to eight weeks for delivery. Payment was made with checks, not PayPal or online banking. Looking for a good place to eat? You’d ask someone for a recommendation and hope they were right, since there was no crowdsourcing via review sites like Yelp. Reservations were made over the phone, not online. And having your own car or taking a taxi or other public transportation was the only way to get from place to place as there was no Uber or Lyft. If you needed to fly somewhere, you visited a travel agent or called the airline to make your reservations and mail you your plane ticket.

If you wanted entertainment, you’d religiously watch your favorite TV shows at a set day and time each week, or else you were likely never be able to see them. There was no such thing as “On Demand” or DVRs. At a certain time at night, many TV channels would play the national anthem or disco music and then just go off the air, showing a blank screen. Before Netflix and streaming, you had to rent a VHS tape or DVD from Blockbuster Video. People bought music in the form of records, cassette tapes and CDs from a store or listened to their AM / FM radios. One of the first commercial video games, Atari’s Pong, was a far cry from today’s visually stunning, role-playing, online video games. Later, Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo was a huge breakthrough, as were the first affordable home computers like the Commodore 64. But until the release of user-friendly software such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system, only geeks with programming knowledge knew how to operate a computer.

There was no Google. If you forgot a fact like the name of a film or who starred in it, you would head to the local library building, during the hours it was open, and hope that the book you needed wasn’t already checked out. For more general knowledge, you’d look things up in a big book or series of books known as an encyclopedia, which was the analogue of Wikipedia, or perhaps ask a wise elder. Want the news? The New York Times and other physically printed newspapers could be delivered to your doorstep each morning and provide coverage of the previous day’s happenings. TV news was generally limited to local news shows at 6 and 11 p.m., plus the networks’ national news broadcasts. CNN began in 1980, but its 24/7 coverage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 was a game-changer.

The Internet changed all of that, along with virtually every aspect of modern American life, whether it’s ordering a pizza, buying a TV, sharing a photo with a friend, going to school and even finding a romantic partner. It has revolutionized communications, expanding our access to information, people and ideas from around the corner and around the world.

The Internet itself has also been transformed. It’s not your father’s Internet anymore. Heck, it’s not even your older sister’s Internet anymore. In its early days — which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent — it was a static network designed to shuttle a small amount of data or a short message between two terminals and store information published and maintained only by expert coders. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this electronic leviathan every moment. And the content is both created and accessed by everyone, for now we are all commentators, publishers and creators online.

A few visionaries had some insight into how the Internet would change our lives forever. But most people, including many scholars, had no idea how far-reaching this technology and its impact would become. For example, in a 1998 article about the pitfalls of making predictions about technological progress, Paul Krugman, later a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Nobel Laureate of Economics, wrote, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”¹

1 Krugman, Paul, Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong, Red Herring, June 1998, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html.

The Internet has become necessary for survival, a trend which reached new importance during the COVID-19 pandemic. With most businesses and schools closed due to government-imposed lockdowns, many important aspects of everyday life shifted online. Governments also used it to controversially monitor and track citizens for the stated purpose of preventing further virus outbreaks.

The technological advancements offered by our modern, connected world haven’t necessarily always translated into progress. The rapid and unexpected rise of the Internet has outpaced social norms and has sparked a debate about how it should be used, and how it should not be used. It has also outpaced the law, and has left courts, legislators and regulators playing catch-up. This book, which describes the laws and regulations applicable online right now, should thus be considered a work in progress, just like the law itself is.

But before covering the legal and ethical implications raised by the Internet, it is important to first understand how it developed, how it works and how it’s used. Knowing the history, architecture and uses of the Internet will help inform us about the creation and appropriateness of laws and social norms for it.

How the Internet Works

The Internet is a world-wide network of computers linked together by telephone and fiber optic wires, satellite links and other telecommunications infrastructure. The essential components of the Internet can be divided into two categories: servers (computer hardware) and software applications. Servers house most of the information on the Internet: they are specialized computers which store information, share information with other servers and make this information available online. Software applications, such as browsers and mobile applications (“apps”), are what people use to access the information available on the Internet, using a computer or mobile device. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Microsoft Edge are the most commonly used browsers. Popular apps include Uber, Tinder, Spotify, Instagram and various mobile video games.

When you connect your computer or mobile device to the Internet, you are connecting to a special type of server which is provided and operated by your Internet service provider (ISP). The ISP is the entity that provides your connection to the Internet; examples include Verizon, AT&T, a library or your university. The job of this “ISP server” is to provide the link between your device and the Internet. A single ISP server can handle the Internet connections of many individual devices. When you use a browser or app, there may be thousands of other people connected to the same server that you are connected to.

ISP servers receive requests from devices to view webpages, check e-mail, utilize apps and use every other Internet function. Since each individual server can’t store all the information from the entire Internet, in order to provide users’ devices with the pages and files they request, ISP servers must connect to other Internet servers known as “host servers.”

But first they must determine which host server contains the relevant information. It does this by accessing a database that is stored in various copies at several servers, known as name servers. The database is known as “WhoIs,” which is short for the question “Who is responsible for this domain name?” It translates web addresses into numerical codes that indicate where online the information can be found.

The numerical codes correlate with host servers, which are the computers where websites and apps “live.” The host server’s job is to store information and make it available to other servers. Every website and application in the world is located on a host server somewhere. For example, harvard.edu is hosted on a server on Harvard’s campus. The textbook authors’ personal websites, markgrabowski.com and ericrobinson.org, are both hosted on servers in California.

To view a web page from your browser, the following sequence happens:

1. You either type a website address, also known as a uniform resource locator (URL), into your “address bar” or click on a hyperlink that includes a URL for the website.
2. Your browser sends a request to your ISP server asking for the page.
3. Your ISP server looks in the WhoIs database to find the exact host server which houses the website you requested, then sends that host server a request for the page contents.
4. The host server sends the requested page to your ISP server.
5. Your ISP sends the page to your browser and you see it displayed on your screen.

This...