We Must Not Regulate the Internet

1886 Words4 Pages

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” ~Eric Schmidt. As CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt and his company own and operate one of the largest search engines in the world. With them earning $54 billion per year economically, and also $25 billion in the online advertising business, they understand the internet. In fact their estimated total economic influence they have had on the world, it is close to $119 billion (Ha). The internet is growing at an exponential rate. The internet has, in fact, been increasing in size since it was first started in the late 1960’s. As with any resource of this nature, however, we soon found ourselves with a problem. How are we going to keep this a free and open environment while still preventing criminals from going too far and causing other innocent people from having their property and rights violated? Due to the fact that the internet is a global network that is by nature free and open, the US government does not have the right to increase its regulation of the internet in terms of privacy, spam, and pornography.

Background: Basic Internet Infrastructure.

The internet was first started in 1969, and only consisted of four host computer systems (Tyson). Now days, the internet is huge, in fact so huge that we are currently at 95% usage of the 4.3 billion available addresses on the internet. This means that we will be moving from IPv4 to IPv6, which has an outstanding 3.4×1038 available addresses, soon to help accommodate the excess connected nodes (Shankland). Every node on the internet has an address that follows the format of four octets joined with a period such as 192.186.1.1. With IPv6 they s...

... middle of paper ...

...: Thomson Gale, 2005. Print.

Hollings, Ernest. "Stronger Internet Privacy Laws are Necessary." The Internet: Opposing Viewpoints. Edit. James Torr. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005. Print.

Mishkin, Jeremy. "Stronger Internet Privacy Laws are Unnecessary." The Internet: Opposing Viewpoints. Edit. James Torr. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005. Print.

Crews Jr., Clyde Wayne. "The Government Should not Ban E-mail Spam." The Internet: Opposing Viewpoints. Edit. James Torr. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005. Print.

Shankland, Stephen. "IPv4 Net addresses now 95 percent used up" 18 Oct 2010. cnet.com. < http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20019836-264.html> 31 March 2011.

Tyson, Jeff. "How Internet Infrastructure Works" 03 April 2001. HowStuffWorks.com. 31 March 2011.

Open Document