The purpose of this paper is to research the government and market regulation as well as industry's self-regulation in achieving the information network security system in the U.S. This paper reviews the U.S. government regulation for our reference, a...
The purpose of this paper is to research the government and market regulation as well as industry's self-regulation in achieving the information network security system in the U.S. This paper reviews the U.S. government regulation for our reference, and then reviews the market regulation to check the possibility of achieving the same goals through a market regulation before the government steps in, and then reviews the industry's self-regulation for more efficient allocation of government resources in case the network security could reach a certain level of comfort through industry's technical innovation. The review of the U.S. federal legislation and the government's studies on cyber security indicates that the U.S. government's approach toward the cyber security tries to strike a sensitive balance between the two important values, the privacy protection and the deterrence of cyber crimes and punishment. The U.S. government study calls for strong government leadership in cyber security, but only through a close collaboration with the private sector. The review of U.S. market regulation also indicates that it may be more efficient to achieve cyber security through identifying industry best practices and user education than introducing the government regulation before the market gives its honest and best efforts for self-regulation. Given the very fast moving nature of the IT industry, rather than taking a more proscriptive approach, the U.S. government has taken the position that the government's role is to focus on ways to minimize risk and identify critical inter-dependencies to help lessen the threat and to identify the best practices of each industry and service providers. The proscriptive regulation led by the government, especially, the government taking an action in monitoring user computing environment, always has an inherent risk of endangering the trust model between the government and the users, and as a result, the government will end up taking on the unnecessary burden of balancing two conflicting values, the protection of user privacy and the building the trust between the government and the users. It appears that based upon industry-wide and government-sponsored user education, the government regulation will achieve the most efficiency when it is complemented with the market regulation and is used for punishment after the market regulation fails.