title: Emerging ethical issues in digital health information.
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.
authors.forename: Anthony E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Solomonides
authors.forename: Tim Ken
authors.initials: TK
authors.lastname: Mackey
mesh_terms: D054626:Consumer Health Information / Q000941:ethics*; D066275:Health Information Exchange / Q000941:ethics*; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D020407:Internet / Q000941:ethics*; D010353:Patient Education as Topic / Q000941:ethics*
keywords: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN); Internet openness; generic; health information; information quality; top-level domain (gTLD)