A public policy perspective of the Dark Web

This article focuses on the ability and necessity of creating policies regarding the Dark Web, specifically regarding the debate about online anonymity. It looks at whether the government should intervene, and if so, how to approach making policies in this area. The major reason why this hasn’t happened yet is because the Dark Web is hard to understand and constantly changing, making it difficult for policy-makers to even know where to begin, making it questionable if intervention would be worth the effort, despite the use of the Dark Web for criminal activity. This article outlines the good, bad, and gray areas of this part of the Internet, and talks about the issues associated with attribution, (“The first challenge is that there is nothing inherently criminal about using Tor for anonymity, but there is no clear way to sort the criminals from the innocent users if they are all anonymous”) as well as the international aspect of the Internet that makes this problem even more difficult. KEYWORDS: Dark Web, Dark Net, cybersecurity, anonymity, Deep Web, government, public policy, Tor