Laws in cyberspace (civil law) - Essay Example

However, the past 15 years have clearly shown that any activity carried-out on the internet is not only subject to rules, but these rules are stricter and more heavily enforced than those of the physical world. One needs only to look at the process of establishing and maintaining an online presence (website), the mediating efforts deployed by online shopping sites like eBay, the internet censorship imposed by certain countries and the direct transfer and strict application of copyright rules from the physical world to the internet.

The mainstay of web presence for individuals and corporations alike has always been the website. John Barlow claimed that “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity” (Barlow, 1996). It can be said that websites are the real estate of cyberspace, and although accessible to everyone, the process to obtain a website (from the domain name to server space and bandwidth) is underpinned by a number of legally binding agreements between the user and the service provider.

The scope of these agreements is to ensure i) compliance of the user with content and usage rules and ii) consent by the user to the recourses and sole authority of the service provider in case of a breach of content or usage rules. Indeed, because the internet relies on i) a physical infrastructure administered and maintained by service providers and ii) the preservation of goodwill of these service providers, the internet content hosted and transmitted by each individual service provider directly affects their goodwill.

Therefore, websites with objectionable content ranging from child pornography to the promotion of hate crimes are routinely and rapidly removed from circulation by service providers in a sustained effort to avoid negative publicity, as was illustrated by Rackspace when they removed the website of Reverend Terry Jones promoting anti-Islamic views last fall (Shaer, 2010). Therefore, John Barlow’s statement that freedom of expression is absolute on the internet is clearly wrong, as legally-binding agreements endow service providers with the authority to only allow conformal and non-offensive views to persist in cyberspace for any length of time.

One of the internet-spawned phenomena which has rapidly evolved into an online shopping mainstay is eBay. John Barlow claimed that “Your legal concepts of property, (…) do not apply to us” (Barlow, 1996). eBay exists only to facilitate the transfer of ownership of material property between individuals, sometimes separated by great distances and located in distinct jurisdiction. Although typical eBay transactions usually take place without incident, there are a number of instances where eBay is asked by either party to mediate the resolution of a conflict regarding the property itself or the payment.

The “Resolution Center” eBay employs is a court of sorts where both parties are invited to present their case and acknowledge eBay’s ultimate authority to rule on the transaction (“Resolving Transaction Problems in the Resolution Center”, n.d.). As our physical world encroaches more and more onto the internet with each passing day, John Barlow’s statements about the inapplicability of the traditional concept of property to