Is it Difficult to Keep a Record of All Internet Businesses?
The internet today is a huge place with over a billion visitors going online everyday. According to research surveys conducted there are millions of businesses and stores online with literally hundreds of thousands of web pages. In fact according to industry experts is very difficult and nearly impossible to estimate the exact number of internet businesses simply because no one knows for sure just exactly what is online. Thus the answer to the above question on the difficulty of keeping records of all internet businesses is in the affirmative because to date there has been no proper legislation in place to regulate the internet.
At the moment there is no single governing body such as the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to regulate the internet. Most of the time the internet is self regulated as there are just too many businesses that start up and phase out in one day. However, there are many general laws and legal principles that have been developed in the recent years to regulate the internet such as computer laws, copyright laws, libel laws and trademark laws. And although today while internet laws are rapidly gaining importance many legal questions and queries still remain unanswered about the internet and its record keeping.
Since there is no regulating body governing the internet, it is very difficult to keep a record of all internet businesses. According to internet researchers for every website that is put up they estimate that four or five websites shut down. This makes it nearly impossible to keep a constant daily track of each and every internet business. Another reason why it is difficult to keep a record of all internet businesses is because often one business can have around two to three different websites targeting the various consumer groups. For example a cable TV website can have one general website that discusses all its programming, another website solely devoted to advertisers and marketers and a third exclusively for cable operator affiliates.
Keeping a record of all internet businesses is also challenging because today many internet businesses are often fake and are just simple websites that have been set up to con and swindle people. The perfect examples of these kinds of illegal websites include sites that offer miraculous cures for grave conditions such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease with simple herbal remedies, or sites that offer to sell prescription medication with no prescription. While this is illegal and these people who set up these sites can be caught and tired for fraud under the law, it rarely happens because these people usually give fake addresses and phones numbers, making is very tough to trace them out.
To keep a record of all internet businesses would mean to register each and every business website on the World Wide Web. This means registering not only American businesses but firms from Canada, France, China, Brazil, India, etc. This would in itself be very tricky as each business runs according to the laws of the country the business is located in. While efforts are underway at the moment to put some kind of tracking system in place to monitor website activities especially those sites that conduct illegal businesses, it is still a long way off before we will be able to keep a record of all internet businesses.
