Thought Papers

Dr. Vivek Lall

Chief Executive, General Atomics

Regulating Cyberspace

In this essay, I would like to address some of the challenges of digitization and explore why these challenges will always persist. The era of digitization in which we currently reside, broadly handles two aspects - information and business. The internet has rapidly evolved from being a purely informational tool to a platform for conducting real time business in the virtual domain. 
While the information aspect has taken on various avatars in the form of policy, database management, and archival records, the business aspect has probably seen the largest growth in terms of fiscal and commercial models. E-commerce is an example of this. 
Is it correct to say that rules of cyberspace are very different from the physical world? Are there any rules in the cyberworld to begin with?