INTERNET

Emerging from the integration of computer and communications technologies, the Internet is a text- and graphics-based communications system that supports people and organizations in the performance of multiple activities. As such it has the potential to transform the worlds of work in industry, government, education, and entertainment as well as everyday life. A variety of ethical issues arise with this technology, involving not only individual users, but also corporations and governments.

There are two basic meanings associated with the word Internet. In a narrow sense, the Internet is a global network inter-connecting computer networks, from which the word derives. Hence it is a complex network connecting large numbers of devices such as computers, file servers, and video cameras, by means of telephone lines, satellites, and wireless networks. In a broad sense, the Internet also includes that which such technological infrastructure makes possible, which some refer to as cyberspace.

For present purposes the Internet will be characterized as constituting a digital habitat where people increasingly live. Habitat denotes here an environment in which people carry out activities, possibly in interaction with other people, involving specific actions and things. Because the kinds of things people interact with in the Internet are not material in the usual sense of the term, but rather electronic and digital, the Internet may be termed a digital habitat (Stefik 1996).

Emergence and Development of the Internet

Initial development of Internet technology was supported in the 1960s by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense in the context of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union. ARPA's task was to establish the technological and military superiority of the United States. But the agency gave considerable freedom of action to researchers and the development of Internet technology was carried out mainly at university research laboratories by academics whose primary agenda was to develop technologies to allow computers to communicate with each other (Castells 2001).

In 1969 the first nodes of the ARPANET, a packet-switching network, became operational. Subsequently, to deal with the proliferation of computer networks that had appeared in the United States and other countries, additional technology was developed during the 1970s and 1980s to interconnect any kind of network, as long as certain preestablished rules of communication were followed. It is in this context that the Internet, as a network of computer networks, was born (Abbate 1999).

Initially the Internet was used primarily at universities, for the purposes of exchanging electronic mail and for transferring files. It was not until the 1990s, with the development of the World Wide Web—a particular kind of Internet application (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 1999)—that a massive use of the Internet became possible. By mutually reinforcing each other, factors such as an increasing number of users, a growing number of services provided through the Internet, and increasing investment in technologies led to an explosive growth of the Internet. What had started as the ARPANET with four nodes in 1969, had become the Internet with millions of users by the end of the twentieth century.

Ethical Issues

Some have suggested that the ethical issues of the Internet are the same ones that arise in preexisting practices. Another position maintains that although these issues have a correspondence with well known, preexisting dilemmas they nonetheless constitute novel and significant variations (Johnson 2000). Their novelty arises from the very special properties of the entities that populate the Internet.

Because the Internet is composed of digital representations of text, data, music, and software, it can be characterized as a digital habitat. Because of the powerful capabilities of computers and networks, these entities can be reproduced and transferred with minimal effort and delay. One consequence of these properties is a notable characteristic of the Internet that can be called virtual nearness. Every public entity embedded in the Internet, within certain limits, is immediately available to the user—is near in a virtual way. This characteristic makes the emergence of virtual communities possible.

People perform activities in the Internet by means of digital actions carried out by digital programs. The specific steps programs perform can be easily recorded to leave a trace of the actions. In addition, because actions are carried out by programs, there is a question as to who is ultimately behind them, leading to certain forms of anonymity.

Privacy Issues

People carry out an increasing number of activities on the Internet, including exchanging email messages, visiting Internet sites, and buying goods. Transactions with government are increasingly done through the Internet. Medical records are created and made available online. In all of these activities sensitive information about people is gathered and stored. Because of its interconnectivity, the Internet makes it possible to transfer, combine, and cross-reference personal information at a much higher level than was previously achievable. The existence of multiple databases containing information on individuals about health, education, tax, and police matters, as well as on shopping patterns, enables the development of detailed profiles of individuals. Such profiles can be used for making decisions about them, for example, to grant or deny loans, to grant or deny medical insurance, to hire or not to hire, possibly leading to certain forms of discrimination.

Personal information is routinely used for purposes other than those originally intended, in most cases without the knowledge of the people involved. This situation constitutes a significant erosion of privacy.

Although there is a wide consensus that privacy—in particular, medical privacy—has been negatively affected by Internet technology (for example, Etzioni 1999; Johnson 2000; Parenti 2003), there is less agreement on how to confront the situation. Corporations claim they need personal information on their customers in order to be more efficient and profitable. Government agencies claim they need access to personal information for law enforcement purposes. For some theorists, then, the issue is to find a balance between the desires of individuals to keep information about themselves private and the desires of corporations and government to freely access that information. For others this perspective is too narrow because it transforms privacy issues into the balancing of competing claims. In a broader sense, privacy refers to a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Etymologically it is related to the Latin word privus, meaning single, alone. While human beings cannot be understood apart from the communities they belong to, they cannot be understood, either, unless it is recognized that they are unique individuals and have the potential to become increasingly autonomous.

By autonomy is meant the capacity to understand the sources, meanings, and consequences of actions and to exercise that understanding in deciding what actions to take. When information is collected and processed by others, autonomy is endangered in the sense that others can openly or surreptitiously attempt to influence actions on the basis of that information. In this respect, an important consequence of the availability of large amounts of personal information to corporations and government is that it increases their relative power with respect to that of individuals, possibly upsetting a delicate societal balance. For this reason, privacy is not only relevant to individuals but it should also be considered a social good, relevant to society as a whole.

Further discrepancies exist on how to deal with the erosion of privacy. Those who assign an intrinsic value to privacy tend to favor an approach in which individuals must provide explicit consent for the exchange of personal information among corporations, coupled with legislation enforcing such procedures. They claim that existing legislation—such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Driver's Privacy Protection Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act—has been developed piecemeal, and propose stronger forms of regulation similar to those existing in some European countries. Others favor a mixture of self-regulation by companies, use of technology to control access to information, and institutional changes leading to practices where information is less exposed to misuse.

An approach increasingly followed by companies is to develop privacy policies that are made available to their customers, indicating how information about them is used and with what other organizations it will be shared, and offering certain privacy options to customers. But without appropriate legislation many are skeptical that corporations can truly police themselves.

Two factors will exacerbate the erosion of privacy in the future. First, given the pace of technological development it is likely that increasing amounts of personal information will be available online. Second, the fight against terrorism triggered by the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, will put significant pressure on government agencies to acquire and make use of that information, by wiretapping or other means, to detect terrorism-related activities. The Patriot Act enacted by Congress in October 2001 points strongly in this direction (Hentoff 2003). To conclude, a significant, multi-pronged effort will be required to deal with the erosion of privacy underway at the beginning of the twenty first century and to a large extent catalyzed by Internet technology.

Intellectual Property Issues

Intellectual property differs from tangible forms of property, such as cars and other goods, in that it is easily reproducible. Given that in the context of the Internet intellectual property, such as software and music, is stored in electronic files, people can reproduce and transfer it with minimal effort. It is precisely this notable characteristic of the Internet that is at the source of contentious issues regarding intellectual property. The case of Napster—a company that facilitated the global sharing of music files over the Internet and was shut down in 2001 as a consequence of a lawsuit brought against it by the recording industry—is important because it brought to light subtle issues, both at the core of the notion of intellectual property and on why and how the law protects it.

Ideas, literary works, and music are forms of speech. Freedom of speech, in one sense, implies the freedom to formulate and propagate ideas, as well as to have unfettered access to ideas and forms of speech produced by others. In the latter case, the authors of these works regard them as property and would like to be fairly compensated for their use. In addition, the free flow of ideas, for example of those that emerge in the context of science and technology, is regarded as beneficial to society as a whole. How can the tension between freedom of speech and progress, on one hand, and ownership of intellectual works, on the other, be resolved?

The Constitution itself lays out a basic framework for dealing with these issues, and gives Congress the power to enact legislation. Copyright law emerged in this context. An important distinction is established between ideas and expression of ideas, such that only the latter can be owned, and for a limited time.

Copyright law grants exclusive rights of copy to owners of intellectual property or to those whom owners grant permission, but through the notion of fair use it also establishes limits on this exclusivity. If a person buys a compact disk containing music, it is considered fair use to make extra copies of the disk for use in a car and for backup purposes. This is also true with regard to software. The law imposes additional restrictions on what can be copyrighted, including that the expression of ideas be novel and developed independently by its author.

Given these subtle distinctions, limits and restrictions imposed on intellectual property, the determination of whether copyrights have been infringed, and the enforcement of these rights are very difficult matters. The advent of the Internet has complicated the issues. The Napster case illustrated how the Internet made the copy and dissemination of music possible on a grand scale. While the recording industry considered it a form of electronic thievery, for some the exchange of files may have been an extreme case of fair use.

Supplemental Ethical Issues

Because the Internet makes it easy for people and groups to publish electronically, and given the potentially large audience that can be reached, the issue of what can be expressed on and accessed through the Internet arises. Again conflicting demands come into play. For example, freedom of access to public information conflicts with the desire to limit the availability of material that many regard as unacceptable.

Specifically impeding access to pornography by children in public libraries through the Internet could interfere with access to those same materials by adults. The Communications Decency Act passed by Congress in 1996 addressed that issue. A year later, the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional, siding with freedom of access and against censorship.

As already discussed, virtual nearness makes the emergence of virtual communities in the Internet possible, giving rise to virtual community (Turkle 1995). Some communities, in which people are represented by icons and fictitious names, provide opportunities for socializing in novel ways. In particular anonymity allows for the possibility of altering important elements of one's identity including gender, age, and race. What range of behavior is permissible in these situations? What would count as violence, as being too close to another person, as an attempted rape (Johnson 2000)?

Global Issues

A more global view raises two sociopolitical questions. First, given that the Internet facilitates the association of people with shared views, in particular, political views, and that it allows for the communication of those views to large numbers of people, does the Internet promote democracy as some have suggested? Second, considering that geographical barriers have little or no effect on the Internet, could the Internet contribute to undermine nation-states?

To a large extent, the answer to these questions depends on what the Internet becomes in the future. The Internet could remain as it is in the early-twenty-first century, except that almost everybody, everywhere, would have access to it and more activities would be carried out with its support. Or the Internet could become primarily a global entertainment machine by the convergence of radio, television, and the film, recording, and computer game industries. Or finally the reach of the Internet could be extended by ubiquity, wirelessness, and wearable computers.

In the context of these scenarios, the question of promotion of democracy answers itself: Although the possibility of performing political actions through the Internet would continue to exist, in the last two scenarios—the most likely—given the amount of noise that a global entertainment machine and the various extensions to the Internet would put into circulation, anything else would become barely audible and visible, including political action. In addition, the erosion of privacy mentioned earlier could contribute to undermining autonomy with, possibly, negative consequences for democracy.

With respect to the second question, about nationstates, the pressure to have common rules and laws, for electronic commerce, intellectual property, and privacy, that would facilitate the migration of activities to the Internet could undermine the sovereignty of less powerful countries. Although nation-states could try to control what regions of the Internet are accessible to its citizens (Hamelink 2000), given the connectivity of the Internet the effort would fail.

Finally the third scenario posed above leads to a fundamental philosophical question that can only be set out in this entry. Is it possible that the pervasive and substantial intermediation of human activities by the Internet—which would amount to a massive migration from material habitats to a global digital habitat—could invite essential transformations of the way human beings are? And what kinds of transformations would they be? But importantly, do people still have the ability to actually ask this question, or will the increasing noise make such questioning impossible?

AGUSTIN A. ARAYA

SEE ALSO Computer Ethics;Computer Virusus;Cyberspace;Digital Divide;Hypertext;Networks.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbate, Janet. (1999). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fischetti. (1999). Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. San Francisco: Harper.

Castells, Manuel. (2001). The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dreyfus, Hubert. (2001). On the Internet. New York: Routledge. The author presents a critique of the Internet reminiscent of his previous critique of Artificial Intelligence. Focusing on possibilities opened up by the Internet such as navigation with hyper-links, distance learning, disembodied telepresence, and anonymity the author shows them to give rise to weaker forms of experience when compared with the way in which people deal with the world without the intermediation of the Internet.

Etzioni, Amitai. (1999). The Limits of Privacy. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Halbert, Terry, and Elaine Ingulli, eds. (2002). CyberEthics. Cincinnati, OH: West-Thomson Learning. See especially in this collection John Perry Barlow's "The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age."

Hamelink, Cees J. (2000). The Ethics of Cyberspace. London: SAGE Publications.

Hentoff, Nat. (2003). The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance. New York: Seven Stories Press.

Johnson, Deborah G. (2000). Computer Ethics, 3rd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Parenti, Christian. (2003). The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

Poster, Mark. (2001). What's the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. In this ambitious work, the Internet and its transformative power is examined from a variety of perspectives ranging from Heideggerian meditations on technology to Foucauldian considerations of subjectivity to post-Marxian analyses of capitalism and the nation-state. By juxtaposing these perspectives a rich understanding of the Internet emerges.

Stefik, Mark. (1999). The Internet Edge: Social, Legal, and Technological Challenges for a Networked World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Stefik, Mark, ed. (1996). Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Turkle, Sherry. (1995). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.