How do you deal with a place like the internet?

From a legal standpoint, the internet is figuratively speaking like the old American West. In the UK where a specific law has not been written about the internet and then someone exploits it criminally, for example, judges have been known to get creative with laws that pre-date the internet to make them fit in with the modern world so that people can’t get away with a blatant criminal act.

The UK is not the only place where this has happened, every nation in the world has done similar things. For example, when the “dark web” came into existence its main purposes was to circumvent certain national laws. A good example of this was the dark website Silk Road, which the owner of the website used the dark web to set up a virtual market place best known for the sale of illicit drugs. Enabling drug dealers to sell to anyone in the world and then use the postal service to dispatch the product to the consumer.

Now, this essentially circumvented every nations law regarding the supply of drugs, as all of those laws were written pre-internet and assuming a direct supply from dealer to consumer in a physical transaction. This didn’t fit any of these laws and caused law enforcement agencies across the world all sorts of issues about how to deal with this new way that people were buying and selling drugs. Add in the fact that the dark web is heavily…