Concepts of «information society» and «electronic state»: issues of legal support

Abstract

The article is devoted to the research of conceptual problems of legal support of functioning and development of information society and electronic state in the context of today’s realities. In the article the author proceeds from the fact that the information society is not just a society in which the activities of most people are related to the creation, analysis, storage and dissemination of information, using of information networks, information communication channels, etc., and such a society, in which the existence and activity of almost every individual are inseparable from the complex of information technology devices and related segments of the information space, free access to which is possible regardless of specific temporal-and-spatial dimensions, that is, from anywhere and at any time at the request of the individual. According to the author, the most urgent problems of legal regulation of the modern information society are the following: 1. The problem of the optimality of the relation between law and other social regulators in regulating relations functioning in the information society, in particular, finding a balance between legal and moral regulation of relations in the extraterritorial (global) information space. 2. The problem of establishing more relevant relationships between national and international (supranational) law in the process of regulating modern information relations. 3. The problem of correct alignment of priorities in the regulation of social relations in the information society. 4. The problem of transformation of the institution of legal responsibility for offenses and crimes committed through the use of information and telecommunication systems, in particular, the Internet. As a result of the research the author draws the following conclusions: 1. The complexity of ensuring effective legal regulation of relations in the information society is primarily due to the fact that within it individual freedom is gradually becoming an end in itself, which takes on various forms of expression, including those that are harmful to society and contrary to the norms and principles of the traditional morality. Freedom as an end in itself is already practically fully embodied in the virtual component of the information society, which, having a multifaceted relationship with the real social environment, contributes to the fact that within the latter the moral regulation of human relations is increasingly lost, which, among other things, is a necessary prerequisite for respect for the law and its prescriptions, embodied in the legislation, and therefore, for their proper implementation in an appropriate form. The devaluation of the values of traditional morality in the virtual information space has already led to a considerable number of moral-and-law problems at the theoretical and applied levels, as well as to the practical impossibility of solving them only through legal norms. 2. The functioning of the concept of «electronic state» should not completely supersede the traditional in society variants of the relationship between public authorities and individuals and legal entities, the benefits of which have not lost their relevance today. In particular, citizens and legal entities should be left with the right to choose the form of interaction with the authorities (oral, written or electronic), and individual exceptions to it can be established only in relation to specific relationships, the objective specificity of which stipulates the need for their normative fixing. Keywords: information society, electronic state, law, morality, Internet, legal liability, legislation.