Computer Law Commons^™

Product Life Cycle Theory And The Maturation Of The Internet, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Much of the recent debate over Internet policy has focused on the permissibility of business practices that are becoming increasingly common, such as new forms of network management, prioritization, pricing, and strategic partnerships. This Essay analyzes these developments through the lens of the management literature on the product life cycle, dominant designs, technological trajectories and design hierarchies, and the role of complementary assets in determining industry structure. This analysis suggests that many of these business practices may represent nothing more than a reflection of how the nature of competition changes as industries mature. This in turn suggests that network neutrality …

Free Speech And The Myth Of The Internet As An Unintermediated Experience, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, a growing number of commentators have raised concerns that the decisions made by Internet intermediaries — including last-mile network providers, search engines, social networking sites, and smartphones — are inhibiting free speech and have called for restrictions on their ability to prioritize or exclude content. Such calls ignore the fact that when mass communications are involved, intermediation helps end users to protect themselves from unwanted content and allows them to sift through the avalanche of desired content that grows ever larger every day. Intermediation also helps solve a number of classic economic problems associated with the Internet. …

Network Neutrality Or Internet Innovation?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, the Internet has undergone an extensive re-ordering of its topology that has resulted in increased variation in the price and quality of its services. Innovations such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Relatedly, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements and pricing. This variation has been interpreted by some as network providers attempting to promote their self interest at the expense of the public. In fact, these …

Context Is Everything: Sociality And Privacy In Online Social Network Sites, Ronald Leenes

Ronald Leenes

Social Network Sites (SNSs) pose many privacy issues. Apart from the fact that privacy in an online social network site may sound like an oxymo- ron, significant privacy issues are caused by the way social structures are currently handled in SNSs. Conceptually different social groups are generally conflated into the singular notion of ‘friend’. This chapter argues that attention should be paid to the social dynamics of SNSs and the way people handle social contexts. It shows that SNS technology can be designed to support audience segregation, which should mitigate at least some of the privacy issues in Social Network …

Google Analytics: Analyzing The Latest Wave Of Legal Concerns For Google In The U.S. And The E.U., 7 Buff. Intell. Prop. L.J. 135 (2010), Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The next wave of concern regarding Google involves web analytics. Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. The concerns of web analytics use touches on issues of online user privacy, government use of personal information, and information on website user activity. While Google Analytics is not the sole web analytics product on the market, it is widely used by corporate, non-profit, and government organizations. The product has been reported to have a 59% market share among web analytics vendors in a 2008 study.

Web analytics technology …

Innovations In The Internet’S Architecture That Challenge The Status Quo, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The current debate over broadband policy has largely overlooked a number of changes to the architecture of the Internet that have caused the price paid by and quality of service received by traffic traveling across the Internet to vary widely. Topological innovations, such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks, have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Moreover, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements. Some of these innovations are responses to the growing importance of peer-to-peer technologies. Others, such …