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Government regulation has encountered new challenges with the emergence of the Internet. The Internet presents many challenges to government regulation. Throughout the world, countries must decide not only how to regulate, but how much to regulated.
The two major challenges the Internet has brought to regulations are new technology and lack of physical borders. New technology affects issues like privacy and intellectual property, the lack of borders affects taxation and gambling. Free speech is affected by both issues (Rayport & Jaworski, 2002:596).
The five main issues are:
Privacy is an issue because Internet companies have new technology that can track a user's every movement (Rayport & Jaworski, 2002:596).
Intellectual property has become an issue because new technology makes it easy to copy high-quality music such as Napster and trade them over the Internet (Rayport & Jaworski, 2002:597).
Taxation is an issue because e-commerce companies do not have to collect sales tax on their customers' purchases. While this is an advantage to customers, it costs the states billions of dollars a year (Rayport & Jaworski, 2002:597).
Gambling is an issue because the Internet makes it difficult to decide where the transaction take place, and therefore, which region's law should regulate that transaction (Rayport & Jaworski, 2002:597).
Free speech has become an issue because the internet now allows millions of people to speak their mind annoymously, something that has never happened before (Rayport & Jaworski, 2002:597).
The United States and Europe have been working together on both privacy and cybercrim issues. While Europe has stricter laws regulating privacy that the United States, U.S e-commerce companies are reluctant to adopt them since the regulations would limit their ability to do personalised advertising. Europe wants to ban American companies from doing business with its citizens until European privacy standards are implemented (Queensland University of Technology, School of International Business, 2004) . The European Union and the United States are also working together to create laws prohibiting cybercrime. These laws have come under attack from privacy advocates who are concerned with giving governments the right to monitor online behaviour (Rayport & Jaworski, 2002:597).
1. Queensland University of Technology, School of International Business (2004) Introduction to e-business Australia: McGraw-Hill & QUT Custom Publication, ISBN 7777772570.
2. Rayport, J. F. (2002) Introduction to e-eommerce, Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin marketspaceU, ISBN 0072510242.
Yipshinyi 12:01, 28 Oct 2005 (EST)
