Law and Policy in the Age of the Internet

Abstract

The world is just at the dawn of the Internet revolution, a revolution that promises both benefits and new sets of challenges, if not problems. The benefits manifest themselves in political, economic, and social dimensions. The policy challenges are more numerous, but four in particular have attracted significant attention: privacy, intellectual property protection, taxation, and “open access” to high-speed or “broadband” networks. In this Essay, I survey the benefits of the Internet and then outline a framework for dealing with the aforementioned policy issues. My approach is eclectic. I doubt that the four issues will (or should) be resolved either by the market or by government alone, and thus I recommend a judicious mix of the two. I also want to be clear that in the fast-moving Internet environment, policymakers’ first instinct should be to rely on markets and technology to address troublesome issues and to act only if there are identifiable market failures that can be corrected usefully by some type of government intervention. Fur-