The regulated end of internet law, and the return to computer and information law?

The 2020s will finally be the decade of cyberlaw, not as ‘Law of the Horse’, but as digital natives finally help bring the law syllabus, legal practice and even legislatures into the Information Society. In the first part of the chapter, I explain how the cyberlawyers of the 1990s dealt with regulation of the then novel features of the public Internet. Internet law was a subject of much interest in the 1990s in the US, and some specialist interest in UK and Europe. In Part 2, I explain the foundational rules for the adaptation of liability online initially focussed on absolving intermediaries of legal responsibility for end user posted content. This exceptionalist approach gradually gave way. While some US authors are hamstrung by a faith in the myth of the superuser and somewhat benign intentions of corporations as opposed to federal and state government, there has been a gradual convergence on the role of regulated self-regulation (or co-regulation) on both sides of the Atlantic. In Part 3, I argue that the use of co-regulation has been fundamentally embedded since European nations began to enforce these rules, with limited enforcement in which judges and regulators stated that business models largely focussed on encouraging illegal posting would not be protected. Settled policy on liability, privacy, trust, encryption, open Internet policies against filtering, were arrived at as a result of expert testimony and exhaustive hearings. In the final Part 4, I argue that hanging those policies on a whim results in potentially catastrophic results in terms of untying the Gordian knots of intermediary safe harbour/harbor, privacy, copyright enforcement, and open Internet European regulations.