Seite - 62 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

internet will render society increasingly vulnerable to threats. This will eventually enhance the volume and variety of the social dilemmas encountered1. The relationship between threats, vulnerabilities, and value is displayed in Figure 2. Figure 2: Threats, Vulnerabilities and Values The primary stakeholders apart from the netizens in a society are: 1) the governing State, or regulatory authorities appointed by the State; 2) the application service providers (ASPs) who develop and deploy the service applications on the WWW and; 3) the internet service providers (ISPs) who provide the connectivity between the ASP and the netizen. There are several intermediaries apart from those identified. These intermediaries leverage state-of-the-art technologies like cloud computing and big data analytics. They can be grouped as sub- categories of the designated stakeholders however, for the purpose of designing the proposed framework. The Framework The design of a framework based on risk and values should be flexible enough to ride the inherent dynamism internet technologies. There have to be different approaches for handling the long and short fall-outs of a technology as pervasive as the WWW. I posit that in the short term, a utilitarian approach based on local preferences is more viable. Mill (1879) in his classic Utilitarianism has propounded the "the greatest-happiness principle"; while harmonizing it with basic morality. He opined that conventional morality is largely utilitarian in nature. Lucas and Galinsky (2005) have written that both risk and utilitarianism share common antecedent vis-à-vis the psychological basis of moral judgments, and that utilitarian choice is primarily studied in the context of moral dilemmas. Greene et al., (2001) have asserted that a utilitarian option optimizes benefits for the overall collective. It lays out a simple normative framework for maximizing 1 An oblique threat for society stems from the fact that the instruments available to political sovereign states by the internet to pursue lawful objectives (e.g. crime prevention) are similar to those which the same governments might use to suppress rights (political dissent, freedom of speech, violation of privacy et al). 62