David Neal

I want a new job. I want a job with a single responsibility. I want a key, and I want a man with a strong dependable name like Mike to have a key also. I want both of us to walk down a long corridor where should anybody open a door and be confronted by us they would doff an imaginary cap and turn back inside.

I want Mike and I to come to a final large door, put our eyes up to a biometric scanning device and be granted access to a room with a panel with two keyholes in it. I want Mike and I to put our keys in these holes in unison and turn them. Then I want a mechanism to spring to life and slowly and solemnly reveal a large lever and a map that shows every single live internet connection in the world.

I want Mike to give me a reassuring look, highlight one of these connections, and nod in the direction of the lever. Then I want to grasp the lever with both hands and pull it towards me, and in doing so turn off that internet connection.

Unlikely as all this sounds - for one thing I do not have the relevant experience - it strikes me as being one possible solution to the epidemic of crime sweeping the net.

Where once fraud, spam, pornography and the like were all somewhat minor irritations that you came across if you strayed from your usual browsing paths, now they come right to your mailbox, or worm their way through your system with ease, and without your knowledge or input. Everyone from your mum to your neighbour to your colleagues are going to be touched in some way ... and always without any real redress.

What's needed is an internet overseeing body with responsibility for enforcing internet law and best practices. This organisation would have the means and the ability to spot crime, stop it, and bring charges against the perpetrators. It would have to work as a kind of old-fashioned lawman, searching out illegality and injustice and quashing it like Wyatt Earp did in the Old West ... only without the bodycount.

Unfortunately, particularly as I would so much like to be its keymaster, I do not think that such a body is possible. After all it would have to spend years just trying to work out how it would work. It is all very well for me to imagine that stopping one person using the internet would be as simple as severing their connection, but people can mask themselves and hide behind multiple names and addresses, making them not only hard to identify but also nigh on impossible to locate.

At the moment it is the cowboys who have control of the internet, the rest of us just have to watch ourselves, while our ISPs, antivirus vendors and the like do their best to watch our backs.

But, now that criminals and virus writers have shown how easy it is to wreak havoc on the internet and on company systems, it must be time for national regulators to start considering the possibilities of such an outfit.

Spam is already threatening the usefulness of email, while fraud is doing the same for the internet.

If we let this situation carry on for much longer, there will be little chance of law and order ever returning to the cyber-frontier.

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