Abstract: This essay steps back from the more detailed regulatory discussions in other contributions to this roundtable on "Competing Visions for Cyberspace" and highlights three broad issues that raise ethical concerns about our activity online. First, the commodification of people—their identities, their data, their privacy—that lies at the heart of business models of many of the largest information and communication technologies companies risks instrumentalizing human beings. Second, concentrations of wealth and market power online may be contributing to economic inequalities and other forms of domination. Third, long-standing tensions between the security of states and the human security of people in those states have not been at all resolved online and deserve attention.
Keywords: cyberspace, ethics, data stewardship, economic inequality, human security, national security, sovereignty
The full roundtable essay is available to subscribers only. Click here for access.
More in this issue
Winter 2018 (32.4) • Review Essay
Human Rights Under Attack: What Comes Next?
Micheline Ishay laments the recent onslaught against the human rights movement even from professed supporters, taking Samuel Moyn’s recent book Not Enough as indicative ...
Winter 2018 (32.4) • Essay
What if Cyberspace Were for Fighting?
This essay explores the ethical and legal implications of prioritizing cyberspace as a warfighting domain. The authors envision a world where states take on a ...
Winter 2018 (32.4) • Review
Return of the Barbarians: Confronting Non-State Actors from Ancient Rome to the Present, by Jakub J. Grygiel
In this book, Jakub J. Grygiel provocatively shows how strategic actors beyond nation-states are making resurgence.