Viewpoints: Should we regulate the Internet?

This article will first argue and critically explore the positive and negative aspects of living in a society in which the media has come up to a certain point, where information can be accessed roughly on every mean of technology available and will then establish the influence and impact it has upon the individuals. It then continues with a close examination of the manner in which both for and against media regulation opinions shape the society in which we are living, focusing on the impact of the Internet. Finally, it aims attention at the freedom of speech, which allows people to communicate or express themselves in any manner they feel, either positively or negatively, keeping in mind the ethical guidelines of the human rights.

Media regulation is quite often a manifestation of policies settled on by governments, and these thus are based upon political or moral ideologies or philosophies about the way in which the society is influenced by the various roles of media. Diverse societies have additionally taken distinctive approaches to deal with the regulation of media, some setting the different and various form and associations under the immediate control of the state, though others in the nation's constitution. In the meantime as mass media shapes evolved, numerous individuals were restless about the effect of these media and they questioned that, either to secure the powerless individuals or to promote a decent society, we have to control media somehow. At the point when something is regulated it is controlled or limited by some means. Modern states have consistently been active in attempting to control media organizations and the content they produce in order to accomplish a set of policy goals. They attempt to assure that something occurs or is kept from occurring. (Long & Wall, 2014:207-209)

At the point when technological changes happen, they are appealing, they are dangerous, they are perplexing and they modify the status quo. Youngsters receive and adopt them faster than old individuals, wealthier individuals and nations have access to them before poorer individuals and nations. There are numerous dimensions to these progressions and they must be considered from numerous perspectives — as economic, political and social risk and opportunities. They have an especially noteworthy impact on the media, influencing producers and consumers, users and non-users and affecting the content of and access to data, the manner in which it is produced and how the firms inside of the industries adjust deliberately and re-orientate themselves. Subsequently, radio stations, magazines, TV telecasters, Internet content combined and mobile services are all media firms. (Keen, 2007:2-9)

By the means of their very nature, media influence the types of content that can be passed on to them. Content industries are accurately related and identifiable with media since they make material that can be passed on through media. In spite of the fact that the Internet itself is not regulated, the media industries are and governments have needed to rearrange regulations and law to the new stage or platform. The Internet has set up itself with astounding, maybe remarkable, speed as a necessary and integral component of everyday life for individuals everywhere throughout the world, at work and even at home.  (Küng, Picard, & Towse, 2008:3-8)

The Internet incorporates an incomprehensibly vast ocean of information that is significantly changing the dimension and nature of human correspondence and communication. Not only has it significantly diminished the expense of correspondence and capacitate seemingly impossible and inconceivable distances to be crossed in a split-second, yet it likewise progressively incorporates all other media into itself. Mail, dialing, film, TV, music, radio, photography-all have been converted into computerised and digital frame and became accessible in significantly more approachable ways to the approximately two billion individuals, users, around the globe. It is imperative to note, before moving too profoundly into this progressive universe of digitized societies, who is not part of this sort of society, particularly the majority of the population on earth. Of the about seven billion individuals on this planet, somewhere around four-and-a-half and five billion, 60 to 70 percent of us, have no connection or access to this digitalized world by any means. (Curran, Fenton, & Freedman, 2012:149-54)

Furthermore, one million of individuals have seriously restricted access in contrast with the taken for granted quick broadband access, which those of us, with social or economic privileges, benefit of. These digital splits sequential revolve around the expanding economic and social imbalance or inequality in every nation around the world, and vast differences of riches between nations. In extensive quantifiable terms, there are clearly astonishing computerized divides between the Global North, and the Global South, as identifies with by these percentages across landmasses: 79 percent of North Americans have access, 63 percent of Europeans, 49 percent of Middle Easterners, 42 percent of Latin Americans, 27 percent of Asians, and only 16 percent of Africans (Internet World Scats; International Telecommunications Union). Access changes by country within landmasses and clearly by class, consequent to even the poorest countries have financial elites. In the various countries with prevalent ethnic congregations and other minority ethnicities, minority ethnic congregations regularly have poorer access, generally due to having lower employment and less social benefits in contrast with the predominant ethnicity. (Reed, 2014:1-6)

In order to offer a far-reaching picture, there were obviously numerous critical issues concerning the Internet that should have been handled. Establishing the Internet as a worldwide communications medium in the framework of prior human correspondence is enlightening. Countless social and ethical values concerns encompass the Internet. A significant number of these concerns are obviously unrealistic to be determined in the close term, and in reality, from numerous points of view, the Internet appears to be an accelerating and current threat. For instance, in some cases, few personal involvements with the Internet might undermine and threat profoundly held values, for example, those concerning security, national identity, property, and responsibility. The concerns regarding the personal privacy on the Internet, combined with the security of electronically held data, is especially antagonistic. The Internet is fundamentally a sophisticated technique of moving and trading data worldwide, all such data should essentially be suited and capable of representation in an electronic manner. (Langford, 2000:14-24)

When you are on the Internet, you give data about yourself essentially all the time. Regularly this data is similar to a riddle with fragments that should be connected before the final and full meaning is revealed. The information you contribute with to one individual or organisation might be combined with data you have given to someone else or to an organisation in order to finish the riddle. Privacy is legitimate if it does not generate any inadvertent harm to a society and its core or root values. Furthermore, since the root values diverge from society to society, the legal expectations of privacy fluctuate. However, considerations around a direct technological attack of privacy cannot be dismissed nor ignored, because the very technological innovation that makes life pleasant in various ways, might blind us to imperceptible enslavement or reveal private information to public ridicule. (Batra, 2007:40-45)

There are astonishing numbers of statues, torts and other legitimate assurances of privacy. The issue is that they are at present so frail they cannot provide as a satisfactory response to the thriving issues brought on by the spreading and expansion of online gossip. One of the essential issues with the law is that it is eradicated by obsolete perceptions of privacy. Privacy policies display the contractual relationship amongst users and the applications or apps, as we know them, regularly includes a ‘Term and conditions’ section. It will regularly likewise characterise the degree to which the application can utilise private data in order to generate income through advertising. Then again, data security involves the ways in which is a website or an application diligent at defending user’s data from outside attacks by hackers or internal ruptures, for example, a leak. Data security ruptures are generally debated in the media when retailers endure a fissure of customers’ credit card data, and applications are vulnerable to comparable compromises. (Levmore & Nussbaum, 2010:27-242)

On August 31, 2014, the Internet almost blew up. A website titled 4chan.org, which has been connected to Internet subcultures and activism, particularly with Anonymous and Project Chanology, uploaded naked pictures of more than 100 women, among some surely well-recognised celebrities. In spite of the fact that this was not the first circumstance in which private celebrity photographs, or recordings were made public on the Internet, this was the largest and biggest leak of its type to happen at the same time. The private photographs posted on 4chan were taken from every star’s personal iCloud account. A couple of days after the leak, Apple affirmed and confirmed that distinctive iCloud accounts were hacked in an aimed assault where hackers utilised a cryptanalytic assault to access distinctive usernames and passwords. In the successive weeks after the naked celebrity photography leak, a hectic, rather violent discussion rose up out of online and traditional and conventional media outlets and from the celebrities themselves by means of social media. (Fallon, 2015:46-51)

While the vast majority agree that it was an illegitimate break of privacy when somebody hacked into the iCloud accounts of the stars and made public their private pictures, some likewise believe that the victims of this break of privacy should undertake culpability for their part in this unfortunate circumstance. These critics affirm that the celebrities ought to have taken better care to secure the photographs or not taken naked photographs in the first place, since they are aware of the fact that being acclaimed and famous would make them a target for this kind of assault. Nearly all the victims of the celebrities immersed into this privacy break were women, which has driven a few critics to imply that this infringement of privacy is yet another case of female oppression in our patriarchal, man dominated society. This callous exploitation and abuse reminds women that they have no privilege of privacy in the Internet millennium with regards to their own bodies. (O'Connor, 2014)

Oscar-winning Jennifer Lawrence has been the most noticeable victim of this privacy attack thus far. It is believed that around 60 pictures and also a video recorded on her iPhone were sold on the Internet. In the interview held by Sam Kashner, she declared that the leaks are an equivalent of a sex crime and blamed the individuals who sustained this sexual offense through viewing and sharing the photographs. Various other famous people, suchlike, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, are in the same manner victims of this hacking attack, which the F.B.I started investigating. . “I was just so afraid,” (Kashner, 2014) Jennifer declared. “I didn't know how this would affect my career.” (ibid.). Jennifer Lawrence described the stupefaction and shock she has felt when her intimate and private photographs emerged on the Internet:

“I can't even describe to anybody what it feels like to have my naked body shoot across the world like a news flash against my will. It just makes me feel like a piece of meat that's being passed around for a profit.” (ibid.)

Her first instinct was to write a public testimony of what happened:

“But every single thing that I tried to write made me cry or get angry. I started to write an apology, but I don't have anything to say I'm sorry for. I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's going to look at you. ” (ibid.)

Provocative photographs in the past would have classify these celebrities as prostitutes, or displays of branding, however given the late circumstances, more media outlets are supporting and stand up for performing artists like Jennifer Lawrence as a victim of some type of crime. Although, sex crime is not the most fitting term to portray famous people’s victimisation, it is proper to comprehend that their privacy was violated and the society’s standards, which have moulded the gender framework might have been affected and influenced by the way in which the media has depicted the celebrity nudity previously. (Benigno, 2014)

The Internet was made as a very contrasting sort of system and ought to be a free space. This reasoning basically relates back to the beginning of the Internet, when it was initially utilised by the military as an open system intended to guarantee that the correspondence dependably got through, and afterward by academics who, to a great extent, trusted and knew each other and put a great significance on the freedom of speech and expression. The Internet is in a general sense, simply one more correspondences network. The debate runs: assuming that we regulate radio, TV, and telecommunications systems, why is the Internet not regulated? This debate implies that, not just is the Internet, from a point of view, simply one more network and a reaction of a convergence is turning it into a network. Along these lines, if we do not regulate the Internet at any rate, adequately after some time we are going to discard the thought of content regulation. (Strangelove, 2015:79-112)

The Internet is an expanding and technologically complex network that cannot be regulated. Definitely the Web just turned into a mass media in the middle 1990s and, from that point forward, improvements, such as Google and blogging, have been so accelerated to the point that, it is disputed, any endeavour to regulate the medium is bewitched. Any type of regulation is defective and imperfect. This reasoning lays on the experience that methods, for example, the filters used to block the content have regularly been flawed, because occasionally offensive and hostile materials get straight through the filters, while educational material is forbidden. There is a spectrum of problematic and questionable content on the Internet. There are illegal matters that surround the Internet, harmful content such as pictures of child abuse, cyber mobs, and the offensive and hostile content such as pornography. It is utterly impossible to regulate these diverse types of dangerous content in the same manner, however, we cannot just ignore it. (Travis, 2013: 213-222)

The evidence presented has shown that the Internet should not and cannot be regulated like the old mass media, but in a more separate and individualised manner. My own position is completely opposed and against to all types of state hindering of generic or non-specific categories of content on the Internet. The most preventing aspects of the Internet content are not illegal or harmful, in fact, users ought to take proper responsibility while using the online technology. I am most distressed about the usage of a constitution or statute in order to regulate such an evolving and sophisticated medium as the Internet because of the freedom of speech, which represents one of the most important amendments in a democratic society. It portrays the nature of our modern, media literate society in which citizens have more various views and values, are less obedient towards authority and more empowered to choose their own path and decisions.