Consumer Rights and Protection
| Author | Jeffrey Wilson |
| Pages | 1009-1012 |
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The Internet has raised a variety of legal issues since it first became widely used in the mid-1990s, most in the area of consumer rights and protections. But because the Internet is relatively new, regulations affecting consumer rights have often lagged behind the development of e-commerce as important new revenue source for businesses in the United States.
At the end of the 1990s and beginning of the twenty-first century, legislation affecting consumer and business rights in areas such as privacy, cybersquatting, and electronic signatures was passed. This legislation marked some of the first attempts to regulate the Internet marketplace. Because the Internet is still changing and developing, these new laws will almost certainly not be the last in terms of Internet regulation. It remains to be seen what will develop for this extraordinarily powerful marketing and selling tool.
The Department of Defense first created the Internet in the late 1960s as a way of making sure communications between different facilities could withstand a war. It was originally called APRAnet, and in time this network came to link corporations and educational institutions as well. As this system developed, its aptitude for commercial applications became more and more apparent. The introduction of the first Internet browsers, along with the development of domain names—the names used by their owners to identify specific Internet addresses (e.g. www.gale.com)—and hypertext transfer protocols (HTTP), hastened this changeover. By 1995, when the National Science Foundation finally stopped supervising the Internet and Netscape introduced the first commercial Internet browser, it was clear that the Internet was going to become something big.
Since that time, companies offering various commercial services have popped up all over the Internet. Amazon, E-Bay, and Yahoo are the most widely known of the thousands of retail companies that have taken advantage of the Internet's lack of overhead and its ease of use. Internet commerce exploded from less than $100 million in 1995 to $33 billion in 2001.
But with this tremendous increase in trade has come concern for the rights of consumers who use the Internet to buy everything from soap to cars. Because the Internet has grown so fast in a relatively
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short while, many unusual consumer issues have arisen that have required both regulatory agencies such as the FTC and the legislative branches to pass new rules and laws specifically adapted to the situation.
One of the most controversial issues facing consumers using the Internet has been privacy. Consumers have been concerned not just about having important information such as credit card numbers given out to the wrong people but also other information such as addresses and phone numbers.
One of the biggest controversies over privacy and the Internet has concerned so-called informational databases that companies accumulate when individuals buy something or registers on their sites. These databases contain personal information that can be sold to other corporations wishing to target those consumers. Corporations have traditionally treated these databases as a normal business asset. Recently Congress has stepped in to enact legislation making it more difficult to sell or purchase these databases without the consent of the consumer providing the information. There are questions about the reach of some of this legislation, however.
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