Freedom on the Internet

While it is an urban legend that the Internet was built to be resilient in the event of nuclear war — other military networks such as MEECN had that role — many of its founders believe deeply in freedom on the Internet. The Internet's predecessors were built to optimize the sharing of research and education information, and security was not an original design goal; trust existed among the small group of initial users.

Governments and moral guardians increasingly either try to block unacceptable information flow, or are surprised by it. Nevertheless, it is a motto of Internet operations engineers that the Internet senses censorship as a network failure, and routes around it.

Law and technology

There is nothing new in the reality that legal remedies lag behind the introduction of technologies. An article in the December 2010 Internet Society (ISOC) magazine. ISOC said "Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence and appropriate actions taken to pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it off the air."

While the rule of law is desirable, the reality is that law is especially difficult to apply on the international, and sometimes anonymous, Internet. If, for example, the server hosting U.S. secrets is in Switzerland, and is attacked by a Chinese hactivist, what law applies?

USENET

With increasing commercial access and use to the Internet, trust could no longer be assumed. In 1987, AOL set up anonymous access to netnews, which had depended on trust and reputation. USENET's value soon dropped with trolling, flame wars, and ignorant criticism of the inventors of technologies.

Spam

1994 brought the first clearly identifiable spam.