This remark is barely even related to my argument, so I don't get why you made it a reply. I'm just going to rephrase the argument you ignored. If you address it, at all, I'll try to return the favor and address the points you raised too.
To secure a computer system, you have to find and patch all of its vulnerabilities, as well as distribute your patch to every node in the network. It's like what Maggie Thatcher said about terrorism. If the defender messes up even one time, the attacker wins. So the amount of effort that the attacker needs is much, much smaller than what the defender needs.
Compare that to a European country without America's easy access to guns. Crime is always cheaper than law enforcement, but in a country without ubiquitous guns, crime is somewhat cheaper than law enforcement. Online, crime is massively cheaper than law enforcement. That means that crime has a systemic advantage.
Who even hires for cybersecurity, in government? Who has the resources for it? Do local police departments compete with startups for top tech talent? Of course not.
Say you're a small town in Pennsylvania. A woman who lives in your town is being harassed by a loosely affiliated global network of anonymous misogynistic trolls. Is your police department qualified to protect her? This is a major flaw in the police department's ability to fulfill its responsibilities towards its citizenry and taxpayers, and we haven't even added black hat hackers to the equation yet.
In a hacking situation, the defender needs to coordinate an entire network, to make sure everybody's using the latest patches, while the attacker can operate solo, which eliminates organizational overhead. Yet attackers can and do share information about attack vectors. The decentralization that network technology makes possible is very favorable for attackers. Meanwhile, most of our infrastructure runs on languages that are extremely difficult to secure, even without questions of coordination.
This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. Some of these problems can be addressed by modifying which agencies are responsible for which types of problems. But the economic aspects are fundamental. Crime is cheaper than enforcement and security by orders of magnitude. Few people are qualified to secure these systems, and many of them can make more money by penetrating them. For every brilliant hacker who moves to the US and starts another Google, there are a hundred who are stuck in Estonia, where their best bet is stealing credit card numbers or breaking into Bitcoin exchanges. The profit potential there is literally in the billions; even Silicon Valley has a hard time competing with that.
These incentives are inherently dangerous, and that is unlikely to change.
My comment is directly related to the foundation of your argument - it's patently absurd to refer to a medium that is built entirely out of formal rules as being lawless.
The short of it is that if you take "the rule of law" to mean the ability for puppetmasters to make top-down dictats like "can't talk about Barbara Streisand", then sure, any distributed activity undermines that. Your comment is steeped in the idea of there being a singular godlike perspective, and implies having a single world jurisdiction. Aside from the impracticality, this would be a truly sorry day for humanity.
To secure a computer system, you have to find and patch all of its vulnerabilities, as well as distribute your patch to every node in the network. It's like what Maggie Thatcher said about terrorism. If the defender messes up even one time, the attacker wins. So the amount of effort that the attacker needs is much, much smaller than what the defender needs.
Compare that to a European country without America's easy access to guns. Crime is always cheaper than law enforcement, but in a country without ubiquitous guns, crime is somewhat cheaper than law enforcement. Online, crime is massively cheaper than law enforcement. That means that crime has a systemic advantage.
Who even hires for cybersecurity, in government? Who has the resources for it? Do local police departments compete with startups for top tech talent? Of course not.
Say you're a small town in Pennsylvania. A woman who lives in your town is being harassed by a loosely affiliated global network of anonymous misogynistic trolls. Is your police department qualified to protect her? This is a major flaw in the police department's ability to fulfill its responsibilities towards its citizenry and taxpayers, and we haven't even added black hat hackers to the equation yet.
In a hacking situation, the defender needs to coordinate an entire network, to make sure everybody's using the latest patches, while the attacker can operate solo, which eliminates organizational overhead. Yet attackers can and do share information about attack vectors. The decentralization that network technology makes possible is very favorable for attackers. Meanwhile, most of our infrastructure runs on languages that are extremely difficult to secure, even without questions of coordination.
This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. Some of these problems can be addressed by modifying which agencies are responsible for which types of problems. But the economic aspects are fundamental. Crime is cheaper than enforcement and security by orders of magnitude. Few people are qualified to secure these systems, and many of them can make more money by penetrating them. For every brilliant hacker who moves to the US and starts another Google, there are a hundred who are stuck in Estonia, where their best bet is stealing credit card numbers or breaking into Bitcoin exchanges. The profit potential there is literally in the billions; even Silicon Valley has a hard time competing with that.
These incentives are inherently dangerous, and that is unlikely to change.