With the speed of the internet's expansion government is struggling to keep up and enact laws to control the use of the information, the trouble is that the internet's global nature prohibits one government enacting a law controlling the data.  Many governments must enact identical laws in order to effectively control the content.
      It is the content of the internet that concerns governments worldwide.  Without effective controls copyright laws, pornography laws, and information control laws have trouble taking precedence.  Even attacks mounted over the internet upon other people and

organisations are hard to prosecute effectively.  To this date the internet has largely succeeded in governing and controlling itself.  Questionable content can be locked out at a users computer using free software that is widely available at major sites around the internet.  But this still doesn't affect copyright rules.

      In the late 1990's a small group of people created a program that would allow them to trade music.  It was called Napster.  With the development of high compression audio files in particular the mpeg 2 layer 3 encoding process, CD quality sound could be created in a

much more compact form.  A form that could easily be transmitted over the internet without extensive download times.  Napster popularised the internet music craze, and spawned personal MP3 players, basically a hand-held device with memory that can hold several hours of songs.It is not illegal to possess these compressed forms of music if you use it as a backup copy of your own songs.  However, if you do not own the original music, or a licence then possession of these file for more that 24 Hours is illegal.  And it is outright illegal to copy and distribute this music for profit.
    Beside the violation of copyrights  other illegal activities occur on the internet with frightening frequency.  Malignant hackers, mostly angry or disgruntled teenagers, who break into systems and destroy, change or download data to which they should not have access.  This data can be simple web pages, and the intent might be to announce political opinions, or to deface a companies profile, or

even to crash the website.  Such attacks have been the bane of Yahoo.com, Microsoft.com and many others. Still other types of attacks include destroying online databases, like those of your credit

card or even as the example was given previously the distribution of your data.  There are even websites that keep track of sites that have been hacked.  A hacker is not necessarily a malignant entity, most hackers (90%) tend to do a simple get in-get out operation, the thrill for them is that they can do it.  Others, the precious few are the ones who actually do damage.  There is however an even more pressing threat than misdirected teenagers. 
    The biggest threat to our lives comes from out of the country.  If inexperienced teenagers are able to break into the FBI's website and damage it then why cannot an experienced programmer working for a enemy of the state mount an attack.  Most of the big utilities computers are connected to the net, even one connection allows a hacker access.  if a specific power wanted to mount an attack on our infrastructure, the only way we could stop them is by pulling the plug and plunging back in to the pre computer era, Gasp, a very unappealing prospect.  Most companies have created security features surrounding their computers, most of the time they are redundant, but if you can get in, even one way you can do some damage.  That is why the American military keeps its most sensitive computers disconnected from the internet in every way.
    There may be a way to stop the attacks but until a court case makes it to the supreme court there will be no laws governing the use of the internet, albeit not a bad prospect, but an inherently flawed ideal.