TEDx Valladolid · 24 September 2016

What happens on the internet must be resolved on the internet.

Cybersecurity and Cyberlaw. The talk asks us to see cyberspace as a different order: without the territory that gives power to the statute and the judge.

Álvaro Écija on the TEDx Valladolid stage, 24 September 2016 — TEDx Valladolid, 24 September 2016. Álvaro Écija, who set Ecuaciones Legales in motion.

The talk opens with a figure meant to wake the question: every second, twelve people become victims of cybercrime; on the order of a million a day. The question that follows is not the figure. It is why that freedom — the internet — lives alongside dangers that are not prevented and authors who are not punished.

The thread is one idea: law is facing a change of frame similar to the one relativity brought to physics. Until then, an event was fixed in a place. In cyberspace, the event can be immaterial and still have serious consequences.

Two worlds

Physical worldAn event happens in a territory. Statute and judge have authority inside a border.

Cyber worldThe event is not in a place. Whoever acts can remain anonymous. The talk calls that void cyberlimbo.

It is not a world without norms. It is a world of private norms. Platforms and services work as islands: each one decides, in its terms, what is allowed. Accepting those terms is how you enter the island. The talk’s example is transporting people through an application: the useful question is not whether the application is legal in the abstract, but whether the act — transporting — is legal in the territory, and what power a judge has over a service that does not live in that territory.

Hence the ethical doubt in the talk: it is not acceptable that a party to the conflict is the one who resolves it.

Three cyberlaws

Public domain

Declare cyberspace a public domain. It cannot remain only in the hands of private islands.

Identity

A technical norm of digital identification, issued from civil registries, to address anonymity. In the talk: something on the order of TCP/IP with an identity.

Cybercourts

A jurisdiction able to sanction whoever does not respect the use of that identity.

The talk closes on a professional sentence: the dispute is resolved by the rule of cyberlaw. It is not a statute that was enacted. It is the thesis Ecuaciones Legales still treats as a problem: the legal event once space is no longer a map.