Hypothetical: The governments of the world have decided that they will no longer devote any resources to policing the world wide web. They have decided to focus entirely on off-line crime, due to increasing costs in funding police departments, and an unwillingness of the citizenry to pony up the dough necessary for it. There will simply be no investigations or prosecutions of online crime, nor will the courts mediate disputes resulting from on-line transactions.
Would society at large shift away from the Internet? Would you? Or would the almost absolute freedom to do whatever you wanted online be too much to resist? Would ISPs take up the mantle of policing the web? Would groups like Anonymous essentially declare themselves the Internet police and try to enforce their own code of conduct? Or maybe the billions of people suddenly pirating every movie ever made slows the whole web down so much as to render it unusable…
You are all pretty intelligent folks here, so what do you think would happen, on-line and off-line?
Trump’s twitter account gets regularly hacked or spoofed not to mock him, but to release fake comments about various industries, with the goal of stock manipulation.
Hacking of accounts won’t increase all that much. Twitter, for example, does not depend on the government to protect them from hackers.
As for media piracy, it depends - will the government stop hearing civil lawsuits related to online activities? E.g. content owners suing ISPs for allowing p2p networks?
There would be a larger market for independent internet security applications. The free market would step in and offer “moderated forums” (gosh, where’d that idea come from!) where people could be safe. (Safer…)
Sort of like Underwriters Laboratories; it isn’t a “government regulator,” but it does help make our lives safer.
Lots of self-proclaimed “free market” advocates, are oblivious to how dependent all markets are, on the existence of laws, trade agreements, and enforcement of same. Most of them assume that with no laws, most people would continue to behave as though the laws were still in place.
If we went to truly "free market commerce," we would return to the days when all merchants who wanted to trade, would have to provide at their own cost, their own transportation and protection. Even buying a product from a factory down the street from you, would require that the vendor or you, would have to pay for appropriately armed guards to accompany it, and to protect your payment in transfer. Instead of seeing prices fall, they would go back to the ludicrous heights of the ancient days. As prices rose, production would fall, because sales would fall. That would drive prices up even more.
If ALL regulation of the internet ceased, then no one who wanted to use it in transactions, would have any protection whatsoever. Goods and services would have to be priced accordingly, and would include enough to pay for inevitable losses.
The early days of fun and freaky free stuff that some people recall from the early days of the internet would NOT return, because it wasn't regulation that caused those things to vanish: it was the fact that they only existed, because no vendors UNDERSTOOD the internet, and thought they could make so much off of internet advertising, that they could all but give actual goods and services away for free. That ignorance is now gone.
I’d probably close out my online banking options (assuming that if they got hacked, no government agency would help me recover my lost funds), but other than that, I don’t think it would much affect my online behavior. It’d be interesting to see what would spring up in the ungoverned wilds of the free Internet.
It would be an excellent opportunity for Libertarians to put their money where their mouth is. It’d be interesting to see if, without any government intervention, the vaunted Invisible Hand kept the interwebz on the up-and-up.
Twitter does depend on the government to protect its trademarks. If governments withdraw from the Internet, there’s nothing to stop other companies from starting up twitter networks, using the name “Twitter” and the little blue bird.
I would also assume that a tech-savvy business like Twitter does a lot of its own business transactions by electronic transfers of funds, electronic contracts, and so on. If the government doesn’t apply its laws to internet transactions, then the contracts aren’t worth the electrons they’re printed on. A lack of a reliable system of contracts, backed up by governments through courts, would severely hamper internet commerce.
And then what about ordinary folks who buy things on the net, pay with their credit card, and never receive their goods? If the government laws of contract and consumer protection don’t apply to net transactions, then they’re hooped, with no way to sue to get their money back. It would be entirely “buyer beware.”
Off the top of my head, it would all come down to which large businesses could take over the role of the government in preventing and punishing online crime. If none steps up, and people couldn’t be reasonably assured that they could protect themselves from online criminals, then the Internet may witness a large exodus (or people would be oblivious/say screw it and go about their day with the same crappy password for all their accounts with no other protection).
As others have said, from the business transaction side of things, reputation would probably be the most important factor for businesses and individuals.
Not to state the obvious, but we most know very different groups of libertarians. Maybe one I know is an anarchist. The others are very much for government in enforcing and protecting things like contracts and personal and property rights.
And how could a business in today’s world take on that function? AOL was just an interim step until the internet and ISPs became pervasive. There’s no way an ISP business could now compel everyone to go through it.
E-commerce would simply stop. After all, the vendor not sending me what I ordered is not a prosecutable offense. So he’d grab my payment and that’d be the end of it.
I don’t think that’s true in all cases. Amazon has built a massive business on online sales. You think one day they’d just decide to seize everyone’s payments, not ship them their stuff, and close up shop? That doesn’t make any sense.