Web Governance Issues Justin Arndt

The World Wide Web is ever expanding in scope as well as in popularity. More and more people are accessing the web on a daily basis than ever before. This is putting increased scrutiny on the standards of governance that are tasked with safeguarding and regulating our individual World Wide Web experience. There are many different forms of governance that are currently in place across the web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is one of the main developers of common protocols that govern the web's evolution and assist with its interoperability. It was created in 1994 and is made of many different organizations around the world. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, was formed in 1988 (Oriez, 2000) to take charge of IP addresses, domain name systems, as well as many other protocol and server related functions. The Internet Architecture Board, or IAB, is the group that helps to define the overall architecture of the internet. This helps to ensure continued and sustained growth and enhanced usability for all internet users. These are just a few of the most important governing bodies that help to set standards for protocols, usability, and also to ensure that the web is a more standardized place. This allows for greater growth and helps everyone to achieve the greatest amount of functionality in their individual web experiences.

In addition to the work of the aforementioned governing bodies, another issue at the forefront of the World Wide Web is privacy. Privacy in the digital age is nearly impossible. But that does not mean that there should not be standards and regulations in place to help protect an individuals privacy as much as possible. Balancing rights to privacy with free speech is yet another daunting task. The internet itself is not governed by any individual country. Even the United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights were drafted more to protect the individual from privacy intrusions by the government, rather than from various private parties or corporations. It is critical that everyone does his or her part to ensure their own personal privacy when surfing the web. When it comes to ethics for business an important rule of thumb is that a company violates an individuals privacy any time their organization collects, stores, or disseminates personal information (Clark et al., 2009) without the individuals knowledge. It is also important to note that breaches of security and privacy can quickly lead to a loss of reputation and a corresponding loss of revenue for the offending organization. So it truly is in everyones best interest to place a premium on privacy and security. Net neutrality has also become a hot topic in the last few years. The concept relates to everyone having equal access to every website worldwide. Regardless of

content, server location, or service provider each individual site is protected from censorship, at least in the free world. Recently this idea has been losing footing as wireless providers are looking to gain the ability to restrict websites that can be accessed via phones and tablets specifically. This is and probably always will be a subject of great debate. While virtually all would agree that it is important to have the ability to block a childs access to pornography, or sites that contain hate or violence, being able to do so without restricting the rights of legitimate web site owners is a very tricky proposition. Providing people with a safe and healthy web browsing experience is a necessity, but never at the expense of a legitimate business. Interfering with the ability of an individual or business to make a profit is not only wrong, but over time it can also have the larger effect of stunting the growth of commerce as a whole.

References: Oriez, C. (2000). Icann. Information Executive, 4(10), 6-6. Jan, G. C., Nicole, L. B., Williams, K., & Shepherd, L. (2009). Security and privacy governance: Criteria for systems design. Journal of Information Privacy & Security, 5(4), 3-30.