Leonardo Decaprio in Bhutan. Exclusive photo with Druk Air st... on Twitpic

Leonardo Decaprio in Bhutan. Exclusive photo with Druk Air st... on Twitpic

The impact of social issues on internet policy making

ABSTRACT

The advantages that internet as a new technology offers to business and individuals can't be fully exploited without taking under consideration a number of social issues that related with its use.Its global nature makes internet policy making a challanging task, creating new responsibilities for the policy makers world wide.Apart from the technical(e.g security, network availability,speed) and regulatory(e.g legal frameworks and standardization ) challanges that need to be tackled there are a number of social concerns that require special concern.It's important for the policy makers to see internet use as a social as well as a technical phenomenon.In this paper we examine how social concerns such as trust and digital democracy pertain all levels of internet policy, posing dilemmas and influencing the construction of an effective and socially responsible strategy for the internet.

Policy implementation for the internet and electronic commerce is a complex process since policy makers, national governments in their majority, have to act in a fast changing environment where international cooperation is imperative while also dealing with special national demands ( Papazafeiropoulou and pouloudi 2000). One of the areas that policy makers have to tackleds dealing with barriers have been reported in the adoption of network technologies today. These barriers are mostly derived from factors such as lack of awareness about the opportunities offered by electronic commerce as well as lack of trust to network security.Additionally the current legislative framework,drawn before the advent of the internet, is perceived as outdated.thus impending the expansion of on-line transactions.As the need for approprate policy measures that support the information society is increasing, It is important to prevent a predominantly technical, commercial or legal approch that neglects the boarder social issues related to policy making.

To this end, this paper examines social issues related to internet policy making and is structured as follows. in the next section we present the social concerns that are related to policy making in electronic commerce such as trust, privacy and digital democracy.In section  3 we discuss these concerns in the light of different policy issues arising from the use of network technologies and in section 4 we present their implications for the policy making in electronic commerce.The paper concludes with the importance of a holistic approch to polcy making and suggestions for further research.