Who controls the Internet?: illusions of a borderless world

Abstract

Who Controls Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 226 pp. $28.00 hbk. John Perry Barlow, founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, proclaimed in his Declaration of Independence of in 1996: I declare global social space we are building to be naturally independent of tyrannies you [Governments of Industrial World] seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Barlow's vision of Internet as separate from real world appears increasingly off base. Indeed, his then-daring declaration of cyberspace independence seems to be somewhat foolhardy now. A growing number of governments have taken legal actions against Internet access providers and publishers using old-fashioned laws, in old-fashioned courts. The notion of borderless to dismay of many cyber-libertarians, is more often tested these days. Most significantly, High Court of Australia held in 2002 that when Internet service provider subscribers in an Australian state read a defamatory statement published online by a U.S. news media, a court of that state can hear a libel action relating to statement. In this light, Yahoo! case, which involved a French court's order to U.S.-based Internet portal to ban display of Nazi insignia on its sites, carries far-reaching ramifications for evolving cyberlaw. A U.S. federal district court in 2001 held Yahoo! decision of French court unenforceable because it violated First Amendment. In 2006, a divided en bane panel of 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed case. Nonetheless, it artfully bypassed substantive question: Does First Amendment protect U.S.-based Internet service providers against foreign court judgments? To Barlow and his ilk, Who Controls Internet? offers a sobering reality check on nonchalant rejections of traditional legal tools to resolve regulatory problems that arise from Internet. As its subtitle, Illusions of a Borderless World, indicates, book, by professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School, tells the story of death of dream of self-governing cyber-communities that would escape geography forever. The book starts with a fascinating account of Yahoo case to exemplify Internet's transformation from resisting territorial law to accommodating it. Goldsmith and Wu pay attention to lives and careers of several key Internet players in envisioning post-territorial order of cyberworld. Jon Postel, god of and Vint Cerf, father of Internet, are among those luminaries whose vision and leadership in Internet revolution are arrestingly chronicled. The book's second part focuses on government's resurgent role in bordering presumably borderless Internet. Goldsmith and Wu explore geo-identity technology and its impact on territorial government's assertion of its sovereignty over cybercommunication. They examine how national governments can regulate offshore Internet communications through backdoor, i.e., through coercion of local Internet intermediaries. China is fleshed out as an extreme example of how and why Internet remains geography dictated. In their China chapter, Goldsmith and Wu challenge West's simplistic assumption that Internet would make Chinese government's political controls ineffective sooner or later. …