From Robert Cailliau
Your editorial discussed how to deal with the abusive comments posted by some users of Google and Twitter (10 August, p 5). For the last 10 years in every talk I gave about the web, the early development of which I was involved in, I have argued that the only fix to such problems is a worldwide legal framework.
Rather than self-regulation, that means traceability of publisher and user – no anonymity – plus a code of conduct and enforcement of sanctions, much in the way we handle road and air traffic.
But I have also cited my first law of informatics: “No paradigm of the physical world can be transposed into the digital world.”
So the conflict between the make-up of our brains, which evolved in a physical environment, and the digital world, in which behavioural barriers seem very different, won’t be easily solved. As the editorial rightly concludes: there are no quick fixes.
Prévessin-Moëns, France
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