The Internet Badly Needs Rules And Regulations

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry proposed five basic principles of global Internet regulation for universal adoption, an initiative I can only applaud. He was speaking at Seoul University in South Korea. Here are the principles: No country should conduct or knowingly support online activity that intentionally damages or impedes the use of another country’s critical infrastructure; No country should seek either to prevent emergency teams from responding to a cybersecurity incident, or allow its own teams to cause harm; No country should conduct or support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, trade secrets, or other confidential business information for commercial gain; Every country should mitigate malicious cyber activity emanating from its soil, and they should do so in a transparent, accountable and cooperative way; Every country should do what it can to help states that are victimized by a cyberattack.