International consensus needed to regulate the Net

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.timesofindia.com/131100/13info7.htm

November 13, 2000

CHENNAI: Internet 'crimes' will continue to proliferate as territorial
regulations are insufficient to counter them in the absence of a
general agreement among nations on the issue of jurisdiction, says a
legal consultant specialising in information technology laws.

A general consensus on the issue of jurisdiction among countries was
difficult to arrive, as it might amount to surrendering some amount of
sovereignty of a country, Rahul Matthan, author of The laws relating
to computers and the Internet, said while speaking on 'Law of
cyberspace' here.

Though the pace of Internet's growth and the increase in crime over
the net would ultimately lead to creation of an international
consensus, there was little hope for a quick answer, given the poor
record of bodies like the UN, he told the seminar got up by
Bangalore-based itspace.com here.

On the legislations passed by some countries, including India, he said
that they could only be called 'lip service' to the need to develop a
solid and certain legislative framework for dealing with
jurisdictional issues relating to the Internet.

"Such legislations do not deal at length with an issue that clearly
needs to be resolved at an international level. While the creation of
a body of jurisprudence in respect to jursidictional issues concerning
the internet may come about through the creation of a patchwork quilt
of different territorial laws, this piecemeal approach will be slow
and uncertain," he said.

On the Indian IT Act, Matthan said that there was no need for a
separate act to govern the Internet in India, as the existing laws
were sufficient to regulate it.

Stating that the IT Act had many shortcomings, he said that
restriction on the operation of 'white hackers', who are useful in
countering hackers attacking sites, was one of them.

Despite helping in shunting information from point to point, the Net
was incapable of determining the content of the information in the
course of transmission.

"It does not have any mechanism to allow appropriate content to pass
through and weed out inappropriate contents. There is no way of
determining personal identity of either the sender or the receiver.
Beyond identifying the actual Internet protocol address there is no
way of determining age, sex or geographical location," he said.

The Internet was replete with racist and hate sites, which were often
'extreme', both in terms of graphic as well as textual information.
While it may be possible to track and shut down a given website by
deleting the information from the server, it was hard to prevent the
same content from surfacing elsewhere on the web through a mirror
site, he said.

On intellectual property rights, he said that information was
constantly being transferred from address to address and no effort was
being made to determine whether the sender was the actual auther of
the information or whether the recipient was entitled to receive it.

It thus gave users the option to violate intellectual property rights,
without the risk of being caught. While this was the kind of situation
that copyright holders were fighting hard to change, experience showed
that the nature of the Internet was such that there would always be
some new technology that would subvert the effect of any legal rulings
that mandated a change in the way in which it operated.

On hackers, he said that the Internet forensics had improved
considerably with the creation of special cyber detection units in the
police forces of most countries. But there was still a lot that a
clever hacker could do to remain unseen.

Indecency, pornography, defamation, trademarks were some of the issues
which could not be regulated in a systematic way. Countries across the
globe were really concerned over the issues and were still groping in
the dark to find a solution to these issues, he said.

As complex as the Internet was in the context of traditional laws,
there was even greater complexity in relation to the jurisdictional
issues that arose from the multinational nature of the net, he said.

He added that regulation of the Internet was inevitable, but warned,
"it is one thing to decide to change the basic structure of the
Internet, but quite another to acutally bring about effective change."


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