ABSTRACT
The United States was not alone in publishing policy documents laying out principles that put private sector institutions front and center in governing the Internet. Even before the publication of the US Framework, the European Union published what was considered a trail-blazing report led by then-commissioner Martin Bangemann. The Herdict Project grew out of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University with the aim of identifying web blockages as they happen, including denial of service attacks, censorship, and other filtering. There have been many efforts to build clearinghouses that could govern content availability online. One of the earliest of these was Chilling Effects, which grew out of concerns that online intermediaries including hosting platforms. The Internet presented particular challenges in managing security vulnerabilities, in part because unlike the physical world, security threats online are not easily identifiable to the average human.
