All issues > Volume 13 > Issue 13:2 (112-231)

The issue of regulation for mandated network neutrality is currently live in both the United States and the European Union. Traditionally, the models applied have been of the command and control or market regulation variety. Both approaches have been extensively criticised and both have suffered setbacks in recent years. This paper suggests it is time to abandon our experiments with traditional business regulation models and move to a principled approach for network neutrality. This principled approach, based upon the rights to privacy, expression and freedom to carry on a business, identifies the Internet as a public good which requires to be protected from interference if we are to fully realise its democratic potential. The proposed principled, or rights-based, approach to net neutrality would see regulations for network neutrality based in principles of fundamental rights and not business or market regulation principles. We believe this would be a radical new model for network neutrality regulation.

There exists a wide variety of location-based services (LBSs) that simplify our daily life. While engaging with LBSs, we disseminate accurate location data to remote machines and thus lose control over our data. It is well known that this raises significant privacy concerns as access to accurate location data may reveal sensitive information about an individual. In this work, we investigate the privacy implications of LBSs from a joint perspective of engineering, legal and ethical disciplines. We first outline from a technical perspective how user location data is potentially being dissiminated. Second, we employ the Contextual Integrity (CI) heuristic, an ethical approach developed by Helen Nissenbaum, to establish whether and if so, how, the dissemination of location data breaches the users’ privacy. Third, we show how the concept of purpose limitation (PL) helps to clarify the restrictions on the dissemination of location data from a legal perspective. Our interdisciplinary approach allows us to highlight the privacy issues of LBSs in a more comprehensive manner than singular disciplinary exercises afford, and it enables us to contribute towards a better understanding among the relevant disciplines. Additionally, our case study allows us to provide two further contributions that are of separate interest. We address the problem of competing prevailing contexts without suggesting that the ensuing incompatability of informational norms can be resolved theoretically, even though it must be resolved in practice. This ties in with the difference between a legal approach that has to align justice with legal certainty and an ethics approach that aims to align prevailing social norms with moral reasoning. In the end, our interdisciplinary research shows how CI and PL are in many ways complementary.

The present article analyses the current situation of child pornography law at the international level and in three jurisdictions with different legal traditions, as well different developments in criminal law and criminal policy. It shows the problems associated with protecting children’s sexual integrity from the perils represented by the use of new technology by sexual predators, while ensuring the free flow of information and ideas guaranteed by an array of rights such as freedom of expression and protection of privacy. It focuses on the legislative activity at the international level through the enactment of different conventions, the application of them by national authorities, the development of domestic legislation in the selected jurisdictions, and the response that courts have given to those developments. The article concludes with an in-depth analysis of the situation in Argentina and proposes a modification to the Criminal Code of Argentina.

El presente artículo analiza la situación actual del derecho referido a la pornografía infantil a nivel internacional y en tres jurisdicciones con diferentes tradiciones legales y también diferentes avances en el derecho penal y política criminal. Muestra los problemas asociados con la protección de la integridad sexual de los niños de los peligros representados por el uso de las nuevas tecnologías por los depredadores sexuales, al tiempo que asegurar garantiza el libre flujo de información e ideas garantizados por una serie de derechos como la libertad de expresión y la protección de la privacidad. Se centra en la actividad legislativa a nivel internacional a través de diferentes tratados, su implementación por las autoridades nacionales, el desarrollo legal en general en las jurisdicciones. Se termina el análisis en profundidad de la situación de Argentina y proponer una modificación del Código Penal argentino.

In this Conference Report, we present a summary of the key highlights and themes of the 13th World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics, which took place in Edinburgh, Scotland 14-17 June 2016 (IAB2016).