The Internet is not a legal vacuum. However, what standards apply in digital communication spaces? In his lecture at the
Sigmund Freud University in Vienna,
Dr. Matthias Kettemann explains how rules for the Internet are created and refers to a new approach to law and rules in digitality: the normative order of the Internet.
As a legal order, the order operates legally or analogue to the law and shows noticeable tendencies towards self-constitutionalisation. Its actors fulfil various functions as norm entrepreneurs, norm users and norm defenders. In addition to state law and international law, there is also a "tertium" in this order, to which one can assign what was previously only vaguely comprehensible in legal terms.
In his lecture, Kettemann proves centrally that a
normative turn has taken place in the Internet regime: From the inherent laws of the normative order of the Internet, the technical and information society forces that shape normativity through processes of learning normativity produce rules whose validity can be tested through principles inherent in order. The Internet thus (also) develops legitimate normativity on its own. This is more promising than the autonomous emergence of the consciousness of artificial intelligence and makes it possible to formulate a new theory of the normative order of the Internet based on a deonotology of the digital.
