The World Wide Web, increasingly a medium through which hate is transmitted, has been compared to the Wild West - where laws are literally unwritten and regulation is insufficient and difficult to impose.
"The medium by which hate is transmitted is immaterial," Mike Whine of the UK's Community Security Trust and an expert in the field of Cyberhate said at a conference in Sydney.
"Cyberspace does not exist in a vacuum and is no less subject to the law," Whine added.
Yet Internet laws and legal regimes remain difficult to impose and in the meantime "netiquette" continues to become diluted and compromised and inappropriate material is increasingly transmitted over the wires, relatively uncontrolled.
Cyberspace is already becoming a battleground for a whole array of hate-related attacks, highlighted by an escalating wave of Internet vandalism related to recent Middle East violence.
A hacker, who claimed sympathy for Palestinians, recently vandalised the Web site of a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, exposing the credit card numbers of hundreds of its members.
So what are the solutions going to be?
Governments need to write Internet content regulation into their national laws, according to Whine, but this will only come about "when it's in the best interest of the national states to bring about a national regime," he said.
Furthermore, promoters of hate and bias should be criminally prosecuted with the help of trans-national police cooperation.
In the meantime, "players in cyberspace will have to regulate themselves," Whine said.
This will require Internet service providers (ISPs) to close down any inappropriate sites they find they are the host of.
Whilst, four to five years ago filters were seen as the "be all" of Internet content control, "they're just not the way to go [now]", said Whine.
ISPs therefore cannot rely on filtering software to do the job for them.
"Filters are incredibly crude," Whine said. " Now [they're] useful in schools but totally useless for everything else."
At the end of the day, there must be "a mixed bag of remedies in order to deal with the issues [of cyberhate]," Whine said.
However, imposing some sort of regime with which to provide parameters is always going to be difficult, he said. "It will take time to impose," Whine added.
