• In a digital society, everybody can be a platform.
• In a digital society, the biggest problem is not anti-competitive behavior, it is parasitic behavior.
• In a digital society, the primary role of government should be to improve market efficiency and freedom with better information.
• In a digital society we should regulate the harm, not the technology.
• In a digital society technology can create problems before it creates solutions.  This is a temporary inconvenience, not a fundamental law.
• In a digital society, technological solutions are preferable to regulatory solutions.  Technology can evolve, adapt and route around damage.  Regulation is a blunt instrument and prone to capture.

The Internet is the ultimate market, connecting people and information in more ways than they have ever been connected before. This will require new business models, organizations and practices in many industries, and this evolution must be allowed to occur. There is an important role for government, but it should be cautious and focused on addressing harm rather than speculative outcome engineering.

Defined, documented, defended rights have been crucial to economic growth in the industrial economy. Those rights remain crucial in an information economy. Appropriate intellectual property rights, balanced carefully with the rights of fair use and privacy, allow markets to emerge and incentivize entrepreneurs to create and exchange value. We also believe that business models and technology will do more than law to secure IP rights. As Google’s Eric Schmidt said, “the trick is to find legal and business mechanisms that allow people to be properly compensated for the intellectual property…”

Factories and roads are the infrastructure of the industrial economy. Broadband and Wireless are the infrastructure of the information economy. There is an important role for regulation and government, but government cannot keep pace with the pace of technological evolution. We believe in the moral and economic power of markets – genuine crowdsourcing – with government cautiously providing protection from harm and fraud.

Packet Switching networks like the Internet need advanced traffic engineering standards that make all applications work well and try to restore some of the fairness missing in the original design. The Internet has always been designed for change and it is important that regulators recognize this fact and create policies that allow for the advancement of the Internet.

The Internet has become an economic, technological, and social phenomenon but this has brought with it a scourge of cybercriminals, cyber terrorists, and cyber spies. Cybersecurity depends upon innovations in the network and at the edges, and voluntary coordination between networks in the private and public sectors.

Internet taxation is a complicated topic with many complicating factors, including jurisdictional questions, the nature of goods versus services, the difficulty of collection and the potential negative impact on growth. We believe government should tread very cautiously.

Often government is criticized but never praised. We believe that the digital economy works best when people and markets are free, that creators have a right to their content, and that innovation occurs with the freedom to operate and not with the strong hand of regulation. Often government gently helps maintain the ecosystem in which these things exist, and at other times government over steps. It is our goal to recognize both.

At Digital Society you can also find commentary on current events, our weekly Q&A podcast that gets the ground floor info on complex technical issues, and our research briefs which allow you to quickly see if a particular piece of research is something you want to read in more detail.