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Emerging Ethical Issues in Digital Health Information

ICANN, Health Information, and the Dot-Health Top-Level Domain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2015

ANTHONY E. SOLOMONIDES  and
TIM KEN MACKEY
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Abstract:

The problems of poor or biased information and of misleading health and well-being advice on the Internet have been extensively documented. The recent decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to authorize a large number of new generic, top-level domains, including some with a clear connection to health or healthcare, presents an opportunity to bring some order to this chaotic situation. In the case of the most general of these domains, “.health,” experts advance a compelling argument in favor of some degree of content oversight and control. On the opposing side, advocates for an unrestricted and open Internet counter that this taken-for-granted principle is too valuable to be compromised, and that, once lost, it may never be recovered. We advance and provide evidence for a proposal to bridge the credibility gap in online health information by providing provenance information for websites in the .health domain.

Keywords

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)generictop-level domain (gTLD)Internet opennesshealth informationinformation quality
Type
Special Section: Bioethics and Information Technology
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 311 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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