Types Of Communication Medium

Does the Internet Need Regulating?
By Tommy Connolly

The Internet, or simply “the Net”, has a profound impact on modern society by publicly providing a worldwide source of information, by being a preferred means of communication and by acting as a powerful entertainment tool. However, in the last few years, governments from all over the world are seeing it as a liability and are discussing how to take action to insure that it is not exploited by “cybercriminals”. This article evaluates the abstract idea of governmental control over the Internet, by providing potent arguments for both sides of the debate, in an attempt to decide whether this is the right path for prohibiting cyberspace abuse.

It is impossible to accurately calculate the sheer size, use and growth of the entire global system, but it is reasonable to assume that the Internet is the “fastest-growing communication medium in human history”. There is controversy over its origin and many people have contributed to the worldwide system but Tim Berners-Lee brought a public face to the Internet with his research in HTML and HTTP at CERN in Switzerland in 1991. By 1995 the Internet had entered the public domain and it had become uncontrollable - “first scientists, then academics and finally the general public” utilised the tremendous capacities for connectivity and communication. Because “the Internet just happened”, as asserted by Dennis Jennings, a network pioneer who played a major role in the emergence of the worldwide web, the system appears to the layman as a disorganized distributed network and that governments will not be able to regulate the system fully, even if they aspire to so.

The most popular belief is that as the Internet has no centralised point and that in consequence it is inherently uncontrollable. This is a myth encouraged by a lot of wishful thinking and not a lot of fact. When users visit a website or send an e-mail, Domain Name System (DNS) root servers search their hierarchical distributed databases and translate worldwide unique names, such as a website address and matches them with their corresponding Internet Protocol number. Due to technical constraints the network can only ever have 13 root servers and, because of the informal manner in which the Internet evolved, ten of the root servers are operated by American administrators. This notorious American hegemony seen in most industries illustrates in principle how America has Internet governance and the possibility of surveying most Internet transactions worldwide.