Does Internet need regulations?

VENI, VIDI, VICI. It came, it saw, it conquered. World Wide Web was born in 1990. It outgrew its capacities and today, runs everything from a pin to a hill. It has grown colossally massive and has defied geographical boundaries and united all to global space. Though it doesn’t fall under a single domicile but needs segmented regulating mechanisms. We need international regulatory convergence in making internet a safe, unbiased and free platform for disseminating information. Portability of data is a big challenge to the asynchronous regulatory environment. Content which is banned in one country might not be in the other, giving the user a loophole to en-cash. Given internet’s limitless boundaries, it gets difficult to prosecute criminal activity. Reporters Sans Frontiers noted that at least 59 countries impose limits on the freedom of information online. This further leads us to a debate of freedom of speech versus transgressional content. We need stronger and innovative cyber laws to curtail hateful and violent content to bolster election integrity and data privacy.

It has recently caught a lot of attention and discussion after the New Zealand bombing live video streaming on Facebook. This event was an eye opener for the tech giant and ever since Mark Zuckerberg has been strongly propagating the need for internet regulations with regards content management. Given the autonomy and freedom internet provides, the regulatory is tossed into the grey, shall it catch the end user or the owner or the host of the information. Regulators suggested that tech giants and search engines have mechanisms to reduce malicious and misleading content, but enkindles another menace, privacy of data. If these tech companies have a privileged access to the data shared between its users, that is unlawful. There is a huge trade-off between which supersedes the other, data privacy or regulated internet. We should make the user more powerful in terms of reporting uncanny content and have methods which equip them to remove it immediately after scrutiny. At the end only a string confluence of the tech giants and law enforcement agencies can set things in order, else its is all talk and little action.