The Interweb is the dawn of a new era- and just after dawn, I believe, it has discovered politics. If you read me, you know that for me that means money, and this is no exception. But it’s more than that as well, as there are plenty of social issue still working themselves out on the Internet’s pages. Here are a few of the more recent, and I think interesting, examples:

Facebook and Intellectual Property: In a decision that has far-reaching implications on what you can and cannot buy on the Internet, Facebook has wrestled a domain name away from a squatter without any money ending up in his hand. Here’s what happened: Amjad Abbas of the United Arab Emirates bought Facebook.me back in 2008 for $5,115. A pretty savvy grab. Rumor has it he bought Oracle.me, Trump.me and a few others of that ilk. Point being, he bought domains with the .me ending that he thought people would pay for. Facebook sued him and the World Intellectual Property Forum agreed with them. Abbas said he bought the domains to impress his friends, which would have given him a reason to own them independently of trying to profit off of them. The W.I.P. Forum didn’t award him a single cent, simply ruling that he hand over the domain to Facebook. Politically speaking, this means that ownership of names is implied- if you are big enough and have enough money, you can make a big enough stink to own any domain url that has your name in it. Expect there to be some kind of law come out of cases like this.

Ownership: This is a bit of a blip, but worth mentioning: Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg is being sued by a man claiming that he owns 84% of Facebook. The man says that Zuckerberg owes him a percentage of the company for some work done years ago- plus 1% more every month it’s late. Facebook says that the contract he presented as reason is fake, or not valid in any case. With so many young entrepreneurs doing their thing in the computer world these days, and with entrepreneurs getting younger, I think the laws that govern business are going to need to change. We are already seeing the deteriorating understanding of plagiarism in students in school and the rise of open-sourcing on the web. How will we determine things like ownership of a company and Intellectual Property rights or Copyright issues with students who learn and grow up in a mash-up, open-source cut-and-paste world?

Reputation: The New York Times posted an article called, “The Web Means The End of Forgetting” a few weeks back, and if focused on people either not getting or losing their jobs because of things that their (sometimes prospective) employers found online. Say, a picture of what you did on Spring Break when you were 19 in Florida, or the Vegas trip you’d rather forget from your brother’s bachelor party. In the era of Facebook, those pictures get online, get tagged, and don’t go away easy. There are no hard and fast rules on this- which is why I think it will become a political issue sooner or later. There will be debates over whether it is legal to fire or not hire someone because of information found about them online- and I predict that it will be ruled inadmissible, as you can pretty much fake anything you want to on the web- especially pictures.

Photo Credit: Bryan Veloso