Sovereignty in cyberspace / Two legal scholars puncture the myth of the borderless, lawless Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Date: January 15, 2006 2:20:30 PM EST
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Sovereignty in cyberspace / Two legal scholars puncture the  
myth of the borderless, lawless Internet


CRITICAL FACULTIES
Sovereignty in cyberspace
Two legal scholars puncture the myth of the borderless, lawless Internet

By Christopher Shea  |  January 15, 2006

LESS THAN a decade ago, in his famous ''Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace," the Internet theorist John Perry Barlow
wrote, ''Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of
flesh and steel....You have no sovereignty where we gather."

How quickly things change. In a 2000 case, a French court ruled that
Yahoo, an American company, had to follow French law and make sure
that no Nazi memorabilia could be purchased online in France via
Yahoo auction sites. Yahoo first decried the effort as censorship,
then claimed it was impossible to identify French Web surfers. Now,
just as French judges demanded, Yahoo uses geographic-filtering
software to make sure websites viewable in France comply with French
standards. (It uses that same software to give French viewers
French-language ads.)

China, another flesh-and-steel giant, has also proved itself
surprisingly agile. Chinese officials use Cisco hardware to keep any
website with an ''offensive" message from getting through its borders
and Microsoft products to screen words like ''democracy" and
''multiparty elections" from blogs. Last fall, Chinese officials
demanded that Yahoo trace the identity of a journalist who had leaked
information about a Communist Party meeting to an American website.
Yahoo complied, and the man is now serving a 10-year sentence.

In other words, forget all that talk about a borderless utopia and
about blogs dissolving dictatorships-or at least tamp it down. When
it comes to the Internet, ''The story of the next 10 years will be
one of rising government power," says Tim Wu, a former marketing
executive for a Silicon Valley company who now teaches law at
Columbia. While some countries are committed to a fundamentally
''closed" Internet, others want it open. Since technology permits
both approaches, Wu adds, ''I wouldn't be surprised if we saw an
Internet version of the Cold War."

Wu is coauthor, with Harvard law professor Jack L. Goldsmith, of the
iconoclastic forthcoming book, ''Who Controls the Internet?" (an
excerpt of which appears this month in Legal Affairs magazine). The
book, to be published in March, could be called an example of
''cyberrealism" in two ways. It grafts the hard-nosed ''realist"
school of foreign policy-states and state interests are what
matters-onto an analysis of what's going on with the Web today. It
also tries to deflate hype by arguing that most of the supposedly
unprecedented issues raised by the Internet can be handled by
existing concepts in international law.

...

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/01/15/ 
sovereignty_in_cyberspace/



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