Assignment ?“Government regulation of the internet does not promote public participation.” Discuss the impact of the government regulations on business, government and society. Response Mankind has benefited to a great extent from the new technologies that have been discovered throughout history. From the discovery of the telephone, to the recent discovery of Facebook, technology has made our life much easier and brought the world closer together as compared to ancient times. Among these however, the internet has its indisputable place as one of the most important discoveries made by men. The internet provides us with a global platform whereby people can easily obtain any information that they desire, and get connected with users from any other parts of the world. However, along with the vast amount of benefits that the Internet brings about, it also has some properties that are undesired by the society. With the easy accessibility of the internet, explicit and negative contents can be spread around the world within a short of period of time and basically anyone with internet access will be able to view this content. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda was said to own multiple websites on the internet that served the purpose of spreading propaganda and recruiting (Eben Kaplan, 2009). Hence, in order to prevent such undesirable contents from reaching their people, most governments nowadays place regulations on the internet, though the degree of regulation is different, and these regulations have inevitably affected the public participation in these countries. We define public participation here as any process that involves the public in problem solving and uses the public’s input to make decisions. With strict regulations like censorship placed on the internet, public participation is not encouraged as the public do not have enough platforms and information for them to voice out constructive advices to help the government in decision making. Most governments choose to censor content that they deem negative for their public image and this is especially so in communist states like North Korea and China. China for example is famous for blocking social media like Facebook and YouTube so that its people will not come in contact with information which may result in a public uprising and protest against the government (Sadie Bass, 2009). However this also means that the channels for people to voice out their opinions is limited as compared to countries like Singapore where the internet is less regulated and people can voice out their opinions freely on these websites. Some governments also see social media as an important asset for them interact with its people, for example, the Prime