In his Response to Professor Hurwitz, Professor Kang contests Hurwitz’s claim that active intermediaries are the dominant source of increasing harm on the Internet. Additionally, Kang questions Hurwitz’s prediction that Internet users will defend themselves from harm by opting out of the Internet generally, or active intermediation specifically. Kang concludes that although Hurwitz should be credited for focusing our attention on the importance of trust on the Internet, and on what might happen as trust erodes, his construct of “active intermediaries”—which entangles hard questions about net neutrality and privacy—fails to diagnose precisely or solve concretely the problem. According to Kang, we should care and fight about net neutrality and privacy, but not necessarily under the rubric of “active intermediaries.”
Volume 161 Issue 1 2013 Response