The explosion of the power and availability of information technology which occurred in the late 1990s and early in the twenty first century left many areas of the law struggling to cope with the different concepts, ideas, rules and regulations about the way that this new medium of human interaction would be regulated. Many of the lawyers and politicians of the time grew up in a generation that had no understanding of the power and promise of information technology but also the potential pitfalls, holes and risks which a person interacting with others in cyberspace could face. Naturally, the invention of the internet was the single greatest leap forward in communications technology possibly in history and it has revolutionized the way that we interact with each other at almost every level. Like any new frontier though, a policeman eventually turned up and the lawless wild west online has slowly been tamed so that online cowboys roam free no longer and the internet is now ruled by the ordinary law abiding cyber-citizen. But what laws have the cyber citizenry put in place to regulate the world of information technology?

In Australia, for example, there have been a number of developments such as the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth) which meant that electronic acceptance or the clicking of a submit button would constitute a binding transaction in a legal sense and that it was possible to commit fraud online using fraudulent representations of cyber activity. At the international level there is also the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce which outlines a protocol for a set of national laws which can be used to regulate online commerce and information technology by member states. The laws of Australia on privacy, telecommunications and to some extent the criminal laws at federal and state level all have aspects of them which regulate the use of computers. If you have a question about the operation of information technology law in Australia please do not hesitate to contact us.