Designing effective regulation for the "Dark side" of the Web

Abstract

After the initial excitement about the Internet as a space outside the reach of governmental control has evaporated and courts in several states have succeeded in applying national laws to ‘Cyberspace’, there is now a consensus among scholars and activists that the Internet can very well be regulated through governmental intervention.1 Nevertheless, the application of the ‘old’ tools of regulation, which have worked sufficiently well in the offline world, to the challenges amplified by the Internet like unlicensed file-sharing, defamation, or email spam, has either shown to be ineffective or has produced severe side-effects. In this paper I will investigate a new and innovative approach to designing and implementing regulation based on non-profit and non-governmental entrepreneurship. For the remaining please see the extended abstract attached below.