Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

Anonymity, Autonomy, and Accountability: Challenges to the First Amendment in Cyberspaces

Other nations may follow our lead, but the inability to ensure that such will be the case is no reason for reticence in putting forth our own views of how the cybercommunities should be governed … Cyberspaces are populated by people-to-people communication – including person-to-person, some-to-some, and many-to-many. Computer-mediated communication offers an environment unlike any heretofore made available, with the potential for genuinely interactive and cooperative innovation. To saddle such promise with an overload of baggage from a bygone era would be tragic.

Anonymity, Autonomy, and Accountability: Challenges to the First Amendment in Cyberspaces

Electronic coding of messages that will permit freedom of choice to deal with anonymous messages or that will refuse to deal with them should be devised. Guidelines should be refined so as to permit the use of aliases and pseudonyms in electronic playgrounds and to preserve the privilege of posting anonymous messages when doing so serves some useful public purpose like whistle-blowing. To preserve order and civility, however, abusive posters of anonymous messages must not be permitted to insulate themselves from accountability for their wrongdoing.

Anonymity, Autonomy, and Accountability: Challenges to the First Amendment in Cyberspaces

Perhaps Networld will not be the salvation of democracy and will not bring on the millennium for the First Amendment’s promise of an uninhibited “marketplace of ideas.” The flow of information is not free financially, nor is it immune to other constraints … Not everyone will have the time, money, equipment, or skills to engage in a worldwide dialogue on the Networld of the future.

Anonymity, Autonomy, and Accountability: Challenges to the First Amendment in Cyberspaces

The local or national laws of the host nation or state could provide mechanisms for subpoenaing the identities of customers who abuse the privileges of pseudonymity and contravene local law. A nation-state would have to cooperate in applying its own laws, but some nations might refuse to do so, offering instead a national data haven to attract the business of customers desiring to keep all of their activities on the global grid unidentified. Even if anonymous remailers are tolerated because they provide a useful service or are suffered because there is no meaningful mechanism for enforcing a prohibition against them, technological means for blocking messages from such servers still exist.

Anonymity, Autonomy, and Accountability: Challenges to the First Amendment in Cyberspaces

If the electronic messaging services are required to accept responsibility for all of their content – as are “publishers” in the print and broadcasting world – then a budding electronic democracy of free speech operating in an electronic “public forum” may be lost. At the very least, it should become possible for electronic information providers to declare some cyberspaces to be “public forums” where messages may be circulated freely. Otherwise the public forum, as modeled on the ancient agora, may be lost as an uninhibited “marketplace of ideas.”