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Full-Text Articles in Law
Beyond Innovation And Competition: The Need For Qualified Transparency In Internet Intermediaries, Frank Pasquale
Beyond Innovation And Competition: The Need For Qualified Transparency In Internet Intermediaries, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
Internet service providers and search engines have mapped the web, accelerated e-commerce, and empowered new communities. They also pose new challenges for law. Individuals are rapidly losing the ability to affect their own image on the web - or even to know what data are presented about them. When web users attempt to find information or entertainment, they have little assurance that a carrier or search engine is not biasing the presentation of results in accordance with its own commercial interests.
Technology’s impact on privacy and democratic culture needs to be at the center of internet policy-making. Yet before they …
The Internet Is A Semicommons, James Grimmelmann
The Internet Is A Semicommons, James Grimmelmann
Faculty Scholarship
The Internet is a semicommons. Private property in servers and network links coexists with a shared communications platform. This distinctive combination both explains the Internet's enormous success and illustrates some of its recurring problems.
Building on Henry Smith's theory of the semicommons in the medieval open-field system, this essay explains how the dynamic interplay between private and common uses on the Internet enables it to facilitate worldwide sharing and collaboration without collapsing under the strain of misuse. It shows that key technical features of the Internet, such as its layering of protocols and the Web's division into distinct "sites," respond …