Читать Legal regulation of the Internet

I

At the moment, it cannot be said that Internet law in Russia has been widely developed in scientific or practical terms. This is a fairly new, specific area. In scientific terms, based on the traditions of ideas about the system of Russian law and the allocation of branches according to the criterion of "subject-method", it is not necessary to talk about Internet law as an independent branch of Russian law, however. Legal regulation of relations on the Internet is interdisciplinary in nature and requires extensive use of both private law and public law methods and means of legal regulation. Separately, we should focus on the relationship of the concept of “Internet law” with the concept of “information law". The meaning of information cannot be overestimated the phrase: -“Who owns the information, he owns the world”– uttered two hundred years ago, has become winged for a reason. The roots of information law go back to public branches, primarily administrative and criminal law. However, with the development of the subject of legal regulation and the widespread use of private law methods of regulating information, information law has been constantly transformed into a complex branch of law. It should also be noted that a qualitatively new stage in the development of information law as an independent branch of law was the introduction by Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation of 10.01.2012 No. 5 into the nomenclature of special scientists of a separate specialty 12.00.2013 “Information law” (previously “information law” was part of the specialty 12.00.2014).

The Russian legal doctrine presents various points of view on the subject of information law. The most common position is that the subject of information law includes information legal relations, i.e. public legal relations that develop about information in the information environment and arise during the creation, search, collection, transmission, processing, storage, distribution and consumption of information. In our opinion, such an understanding of the subject of information law is absolutely legitimate and justified. At the same time, there are other opinions on this matter. For example, A. A. Tedeev notes that “the subject of legal regulation of information law should be public relations formed in the process of electronic activities (humanitarian and economic) and carried out in the information environment.” By implying the term "information law", we mean Internet law, while it is unclear what information legal relations outside of electronic activity should be attributed to (for example, issues of confidentiality of information, personal data, etc.). D. A. Lovtsov notes that "historically, there has been a system of the information law branch that currently unites a number of such subsectors, – as the law of information security; – media law, – or the law of mass media; competent law Internet law, or the law of telematics networks regulating certain types of information relations in the infosphere. And being, in turn, a special kind of social relations.”

Of course, the Internet is a software information system, but one should not put an equal sign between public relations related to the organization and functioning of the Internet and information relations that are the subject of information law. Undoubtedly, the relations associated with the creation, receipt, and dissemination of information constitute a fairly large circle of public relations on the Internet, but the latter are not limited to them. In the field of the Internet, technical relations are of great importance, related, for example, to the provision of technical access to the network, website hosting, the use of electronic signatures, technical means and remote access servers (for example, Internet banking, a portal of state and municipal services, a taxpayer's personal account, etc.) In addition, legal regulation of the Internet is often associated with with issues of competition, copyright, international, competent and entrepreneurial, consumer and other branches of law. Therefore, in our opinion, in the theoretical and conceptual theory, it does not seem quite correct to consider Internet law as a sub-branch of information law, since the range of public relations regulated by law on the Internet is wider.