Last updated on January 10, 1999

Internet Policy Issues

The seminar session on December 16, 1998 presented by John Mathiason covered a series of issues dealing with the policies related to Internet access.

The seminar presentation is available on-line.

Resources

The development of the Internet raises significant policy issues. This page contains links to resources dealing with a number of them.

General news about the Internet

• Wired News, an online daily newspaper with information on political, technological, business and cultural issues on the Internet. Reasonably good international coverage.
• Infoworld: The Voice of Enterprise Computing, a magazine that covers mostly technological developments.
• Connected, a small on-line journal that deals extensively with international issues. It represents a kind of "small press" approach to information dissemination.

Accessibility

Governmental sources

Governments have become interested in the Internet and have many initiatives, mostly to encourage and channel its growth. A few of the main governmental sources include the following:

• The European Commission's Information Society Project. The EC has taken a proactive approach to developing the Internet. The project includes a number of specific initiatives.
• The National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the United States Department of Commerce site focusses on many issues from that national perspective.
• The Global Inventory Project is an initiative of the Group of 8 industrialized countries which is designed to be "a "one stop facility" linking distributed national and international inventories of projects, studies and other activities relevant to the promotion and the further development of knowledge and understanding of the Information Society.

Community

The Internet is becoming a place where diverse people in different parts of the world can come together for common interests. Some of the largest and most interesting communities include those dealing with genealogy, the search for ancestor's. Some of the most interesting uses of information on the Net that provide links into the many family and family research pages. One of these is Cyndi's List, which began as a hobby for an individual but is now a major undertaking.

A model use of the Internet to help bring a community together is found in a network that permits residents of a small city in the United States, Winona, Minnesota, to access information and communicate with each other.

Another example is the use of the Internet to help link the 50+ towns in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

Content Control

The openness of the Internet means that all kinds of content can be published and accessed on it, ranging from the most banal to the most controversial. Inevitably there are calls for States to regulate the content. Some of the sources that deal with this issue include:

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the main exponents of total free speech on the Internet.

Critical Information

The Internet can be used to disseminate critical information to persons who might not have the resources to hire specialists. An example is the tutorial built into the United States Government's web site on dealing with the 2YK problem, Becoming Y2K Compliant. It has links to government publications, software vendors and non-governmental articles on how to diagnose and fix Y2K problems.

Development

Increasingly groups and organizations sense that the Internet can be used to facilitate development by taking advantage of its easy access to information and the transfer of technology. One such site that has been developed by the World Bank and UNDP is the Global Knowledge Partnership, which builds on a 1997 conference on the subject. There will be a followup conference in late 1999.

One of the related activities is BICA 99, a regional conference in South Africa in February organized by the British Council to discuss how to use information as a vehicle for development in Africa.

Domain Names

One of the earliest international public policy issues about the Internet had to do with the responsibility for administering the address system on which the Internet is based. The controversy has temporarily been solved by creation of ICANN (see next reference). A background to the controversy can be found in Mathiason and Kuhlman's paper for the International Telecommunications Society Conference in Stockholm in June 1998.

• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a recently established not-for-profit that will manage the root level directories for domain names and rule on establishment of new generic top-level names. This site contains information about their doings.

E-commerce

• Press conference by President Clinton and Vice President Gore on the issuance of a white paper on electronic commerce.
• An African on-line business information service, using both information dissemination and on-line methods to encourage investment in Africa, by M'Bendi Information Services, a private enterprise based in Zambia.

Governmental openness

Governments have recognized that the Internet is a means to communicate with their constituents, both to convey information and receive feedback. One of the main search engines, Yahoo, has a major page showing the many sites that contain information by and about governments all over the world.

Opinion leadership

The Internet has provided an unparalleled opportunity for specialists to provide leadership through the selection and dissemination of information to lists, to which individuals subscribe. These permit the exchange of information among the like-minded, and by filtering the volume of material out in the world, can help structure perceptions of truth and policy. A recent story in the New York Times entitled "Witness in Microsoft Case Keeps the List of All Lists" describes the list run by David Farber, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some other lists include that run by Declan McCullagh, a reporter for Wired News who covers Internet technology issues.

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