“State of the Net” Has Meaning for Tech Businesses

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend the “State of the Net” conference hosted by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus held in Washington, D.C. The event was very well attended and there were numerous panels on a variety of public policy issues related to technology. Read on for a summary of the panels I attended.

Online Privacy on Trial: Has Congress Given Industry Self-Regulating Long Enough?

The discussion largely focused on providing a history of the development of privacy policies starting in the 1990s to the present day. The general consensus was that the concerns of the 1990s of how consumer information is collected, stored and transmitted remain today. However, there were two differing perspectives on whether any additional legislation was needed. Justin Brookman from the Center for Democracy and Technology argued that the self-regulatory approach has not worked. He was not convinced that the existing Fair Information Practice Principles (FIIP) were sufficient to protect consumer privacy. On the other end of the spectrum, Stuart Ingis from the law firm Venable argued that the FIPP were protecting consumer privacy while also providing an environment for innovation. He also stated that he did not think that many of the new social networking websites like Facebook or LinkedIn would have been created under a more heavily regulated environment.

Congress and the Open Internet

This discussion focused on the recently issued order by the Federal Communications Commission requiring broadband network providers to abide by a series of transparency and access requirements. In a nutshell, the new network neutrality rules require network providers not to discriminate among applications that run over the Internet. While there may be discrimination among different applications, such as email versus video files there could be no discrimination between one video file over another. There was general consensus that the rules would be challenged in court, but there were no consensus on which way the courts would rule on this matter. The panel also suggested that these issues would be resolved in the marketplace before adjudication was completed.

The Cloud of the Internet Policy

This panel highlighted some of the public policy issues that emerge from cloud computing. For example, one panelist was concerned that law enforcement officials will have a very difficult time tracking and gaining access to information because there is no central repository where information is stored. Cloud services leverage networks that have no boundaries, and thus, there is not a central repository for information such as dedicated servers. In addition, there was a consensus on the panel that network security would pose a significant challenge for the storage and transmission of sensitive data because there is no single way to wall-off data from access because the nature of cloud computing is that it is roaming and hovering among networks. Finally, the panel raised the issue of cross-border transactions and the difficulty of identifying a court of jurisdiction to resolve legal disputes.