I never talked about "taking over control" of anything! What I meant was, "exactly what is the legal environment here?" Things like "net neutrality," which obviously cannot be the purview of the American FCC, even in America. "What is the legal status of" the information that you can put onto the Internet? What can companies like Facebook or Apple do, and not do? What about "the internet of things," which might now be listening to every word you say, or your phone might be collecting your exact location and your pulse? (Isn't that "PHI = Personal Health Information" under the USA "HIPAA" Act?) Telephone systems have an established principle of "wiretapping." What's the law supposed to be here? Is it "wiretapping" if your telephone company's switch has voice-recognition capability? (There's not "a person" listening in, after all ...)

These and many other fundamental legal questions have not been adequately addressed. We're all "just sorta wingin' it." The Internet is a public communication network the likes of which Planet Earth has never known. It is very-obviously international, hence the need for consistent treaties. We have to work out these things in legislatures throughout the planet, and put laws on the books which address the fundamental issues of this brave new world.

Companies right now are doing many things that you are not aware of and that you probably would never consent to – just because, right now, they can. But there is terrible danger to society in these things. Dangers that, once again, are unlike anything the world has ever yet known, because they have never before been possible.

We must never allow ourselves to forget what kind of danger we may face. We must never forget that someone blew-down three buildings in New York City with high explosives, with people inside, one fine day in early September . . . It's difficult to imagine such a thing, and yet, someone did it. One day, another psychopath will exploit the Internet, and our naïveté, to do something even more horrific, perhaps "right in our homes." Laws, if implemented before the fact, may help in some way to protect us from our present folly.

Depends on where "here" is. If laws are introduced in one country, then the companies involved will simply move their operations "offshore" and find a loophole. You would need to get every single country in the world to sign up and enforce it. The countries who don't sign up would become the 'havens' for allowing things to continue as they did before. It's likely that the lure of cheaper labour and running costs would 'seal the deal' as it were.

Simply blocking those countries and/or the sites which operate from them would be censorship...

I was under the impression that in the UK, unlike America, information about an identifiable person belongs to that person. Anybody who receives it has a legal duty to protect it and not misuse it or pass it on to a third party without the subject's consent. So if a friend of mine has my telephone number and email address on her phone, she should not have the legal right to pass them on to Facebook or anyone else without my say-so.

So how come we haven't had a swarm of prosecutions about this? After all, we are not talking here about big companies which can change their legal domicile overnight. We are talking about private UK citizens. If a few thousand of these were convicted of data breaches and fined large sums of money for passing on personal information without permission, everybody else would immediately remove the Facebook app from their phone for fear of getting the same treatment. And the problem would be solved.

Too true and also... You could (as many already do) just use a VPN to get around the censorship anyway.

What use is any law then?

And also, country's ain't going to sign up to something that;

* The said country is not getting anything in return from.
* That's going to mean company's have to move offshore and taxes are lost as a result.

A law – and a treaty – is important because it is a "legal framework." It's not a procedural decision by a commission. It carries the force of law that's binding everywhere the law is in effect. Internationally, it means that we've actually sat down and talked about this, that we've considered the actual implications, and decided what we should all do. We created rules and policies, and made them legally binding. We sat down among our various countries and wrote treaties, giving careful thought as to what those treaties properly should say.

Precisely because we haven't done that yet, "the cat's away, and the mice will play." If information can be collected, it is. You've put a microphone into your home and you think that it's waiting to hear "Alexa" or "Siri," and you assume that it's not analyzing every word you say, but how do you actually know? Because the technical capability exists, and because there are no laws now, the odds are unfortunately excellent that you have "bugged" your own house.

The Internet is something that affects nearly everyone and that can do so "personally." We've been so enamored of this new plaything that we haven't stopped to consider – or, to legislate – its darker side. These are issues that we can't afford to merely address ad hoc.

The Internet also has permeated the things that we surround ourselves with. Even our automobiles have telemetry. I discovered that my Dad's car has a camera pointing directly at the driver. (I painted over it with nail polish.) Now, some damned fool wants Internet-connected cars that don't have drivers, and Internet-connected robots flying through the air to deliver packages. And, no one is writing laws. This is extremely dangerous.

sundialsvcs,

You don't seem to understand that and as has been pointed out... the Internet does NOT stop at any border. So as cynwulf said before, ALL country's would have to AGREE to any treaty. Fat chance of that AFAICS.

i think you answered this yourself: UK law does not apply to the US. I dare say you could sue your friend for giving your information to a foreign entityu without your permission for their material gain and, indeed, I'd love to see people do that.
The criminals here aren't, necessarily, the ones providing fake Facebok logins but
*n really, those linking to them.

You're confusing civil and criminal law here. If it depended on people suing their friends, that just wouldn't happen. But if the UK Information Commissioner announced that it was illegal under UK law for people to have apps on their phones that harvested and passed on other people's private information, given to them in confidence, and prosecuted a number of UK citizens who were using these apps, Facebook might suddenly find its UK membership evaporating.

True, however, it is the people feeding these companies the data of others, probably against data protections acts, which is causing this.

Telegraph ... telephone ... teletype ... cellular ... all of these things fairly-quickly had laws, formally created by legislatures. The Internet has virtually nothing. Of course laws vary by country, and we don't need to try to create treaties which supersede those laws. Instead, we can do things similar to the "Uniform Commercial Code," which enables those who are engaging in commerce know the ground-rules, and can enforce them. The UCC is backed by treaties to support international commerce. Yet, every country does things a little bit differently, which keeps lawyers happily employed.

And I simply think that, with regards to the Internet, we should be doing the same thing. "Net neutrality," for example, is not the proper purview of the Federal Communications Commission, which is a procedural body. Congress needs to create new law to set the legal ground-rules of the Internet in this country. And, in turn, other countries should follow suit until a consensus develops. Right now, I think we're trying to do too much "by the seat of our pants."

We do need to formally define legal protections, the legal status of information that is furnished and/or collected, and so on. In the US, that needs to happen in Congress. We are "flying blind" here, and it's dangerous to do so. We ought to have enough experience with the Internet now, as it is shaping-up so far, to begin this legal process.

I'm not so sure, they've managed to pretty much agree on copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention

Copyright is a very different issue as copyright infringements generally equates to loss of revenue. Copyright concerns are why the big media corporations got their way with HMTL5 DRM.

Social media users, who's data is mined, sold or otherwise abused, don't really have the same kind of backing. Plus someone is making a lot of money from leaving things exactly as they are.

One of the largest enablers is that a large proportion of the subscribers simply don't read the "legal bit".

When people sign up to a free service they still agree to terms and conditions. These terms and conditions are put together by an experienced legal team to fit the provider's needs and business agenda - not the end users. They are also there to minimise the service provider's liability, if not eliminate it altogether and allow them to continue to do what has already made them billionaires.

If you read most of the leading social networks' T&Cs you will see that they can pretty much do as they please with your data.

Yeah, never say never, true, but I doubt China for one is going to give up their "great firewall", if any agreement says for example, country's cannot censor sites or imposes rules that otherwise are not conducive to them having their "great firewall".

I'd also say that any such agreement by it's very nature is still a form of censorship and could very well lead to even more censorship. That's the danger of any such treaty.

But, and unfortunately, I don't think that it's out of the question either. As, I think one day (probably not in the near or even semi-distant future) there probably will come a point where the world governments just won't be able to help themselves.

Hopefully not any time soon though.

Where I live, the state government had to change the law just so trials of driverless cars COULD be legally driven on public roads, and that was just to do a trial. They'd still have to change the law again to grant licenses to your average joe. They even blocked off the Southern Expressway to do the trial - from memory it was the Southern Expressway anyway.