Giorgio Pacifici
Pieraugusto Pozzi

The "Forum per la Tecnologia dell'Informazione (FTI)[1]", an italian no profit scientific association, has decided to join as a member the "European Internet Coregulation Network", presented in Geneva in the framework of the World Summit on Information Society, in order to take part in the definition of "the impartial platform" of the needed Internet and cyberspace regulation.

Some remarks could be useful to point out which are the issues that call for this new regulation needings. In the last decades, the Utopy of the Net as a free space without any juridical national constraint was fascinating and largely shared. In effects, at its civilian usage beginning (early 90s), Internet and the Worl Wide Web were the domains of intellectuals and high level scientists and technicians. The interchange of their cultural experiences could be seen as a flux of information in the Net and the transnational nature of the Net and of its stakeholder (the communities of the first users, the ICT industry, the single countries, ...) could exclude specific juridical regulation. From a different point of view, we can observe that in the same years the deregulation trend in the telecommunications sector all over the world enforced the role of the private companies instead of the sovereign States, meanwhile the world international relationships were quite progressive and the "information superhighways" seemed to be the right way to globalize and grow. The citizens, as well as netizens, gave high priority to preserve their own privacy and to promote Public Administration transparence as factors of quality of life. Only the trust needings of some Internet applications, such as e-commerce or e-banking, called urgently for security policies and tools, even if in many countries national regulations and laws were issued in order to cope with the challenge of Intenet, a completely new virtual cyberspace hosting financial, economic, labour, social and political interactions.

Today the States and the International institutions are perpetually under the risk of attack of terroristic and criminal organization, probably sometimes in connection, and the public opinion gives an absolute priority to the security, before privacy and trasparence, considering cyberwar a part of the global war, not necessarily the less cruel and bloody. For instance, in order to fight criminality and terrorism, in Italy a recent Government Decree (DL n. 354, 24 december 2003), that must be approved by the Parliament in a couple of months, states that the Internet providers (ISP) should be obliged to file the Internet traffic and especially the e-mail messages for a long period of time (up to four years), as well as the typical telecommunications companies should file the telephone traffic data. It is clear that this provision could be applied only to the Italian ISPs and this fact both limits the effectiveness of the measure and could introduce a negative difference for the Italian ISPs for the investments that they have to make to apply correctly.

Anyway, as also this examples demonstrates, an international code of regulations for the Net appears more and more important and needed. A code that could not be the authoritarian decision of a single State or a group of States, but must be the shared opinion of net operators, service providers, users, ICT lawyers, Administrative Indipendent Autorities, public administrations.

In this framewok, the "European Internet Coregulation Network"[2] appears as the first step of this new regulation pathway.

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[1] "Forum per la Tecnologia dell'Informazione (FTI) (http://www.forumti.it) is an independent, scientific, technical and cultural, no profit Association, established in 1985, which operates in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the Information and Communication Society. The FTI focuses on development strategies for ICTs and their general environment including analysis of the industrial, commercial and social implications of new technologies and applications such as Internet and Net Economy. It also follows and advises on the legal and regulatory issues regarding ICTs. For example, FTI published an important essay of Antonio A. Martino (Professor at Pisa University) and Judge Antonio Chiti on law, logics and informatics. In cooperation with "Institut d'Etudes Politiques" of Paris, FTI published a book titled "Polis Internet", on the new social, cultural and political problems of Internet society (the authors were Paul Mathias, Giorgio Pacifici, Pieraugusto Pozzi, Giuseppe Sacco)

[2] The "European Internet coregulation Network"( http://www.foruminternet.org), was launched in Geneva, in the framework of the "World Summit on Information Society". EICN is chaired by Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who is also chairwoman of the French "Forum des Droit sur l'Internet", and collects academic institutions and scientific associations from several European Countries in order to promote the debate and concrete proposals at the European and global levels about Internet regulation.

Giorgio Pacifici
Pieraugusto Pozzi
FTI President
FTI Secretary General