The US government shut down a company Pricewert who, they claim, hosted "child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing-related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other web-based scams" for other customers.
Fair play to the government, right? But that isn't the full story - Pricewert is a registered company in Belize but most of it's employees are thought to be in Eastern Europe.
Full story available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8084726.stm
I don't want to become too bogged down in this particular example because it is just that, an example. The wider point is that the people BEHIND hosting all this illegal content will probably never be brought to justice because of the numerous problems regarding proof of identity on the internet as well as the issue of anonymity.
The fact that the internet is so user and content driven is, in my opinion, both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness. This may sound like an oversimplified dichotomy but; a 'good' user will come up with innovative content or infrastructures, whereas a 'bad' user will host illegal content or come up with one of these web scams.
Ultimately, I think that the users will always stay one step ahead of "the internet police" ( a term I coin jokingly).
How, in your opinion, will the regulation of the internet take shape in years to come? And how effectively can we ever hope to 'police' the internet.
