Was it really perceived
so?
The Internet Meets Its
Match
Predictions of a global liberation in
cyberspace give way to a world in which countries use courts and laws to gain
the upper hand.
By Patti Waldmeir, Special to The LA Times,
May 28, 2006
Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a
Borderless World
by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Oxford
University Press, $28, 240 pages
The early Internet was like a hallucination
made real for the beat generation: Aging flower children around the world
seized on cyberspace as a kind of virtual global commune
a world without laws or
borders or governments, where man could live free and by his own
rules.
Now, all those heady notions
of the early Internet era are going the way of the retiring baby boomers and
receding into myth. In the end, the Internet did not liberate us from law and
capital and taxes. Life online has turned out to be much like life anywhere
else: subject to the whims of courts and the laws of nations and very much
grounded in geography.
Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, two of America's
leading scholars of cyberspace, have written an engaging, fluent first draft
of Internet history, "Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless
World," which chronicles the failure of this early vision. Provocatively, it
also argues that we are all better off without it.
Beautifully written
and intricately argued, the book is likely to become a classic of Internet
politics and policy. Its central premise is that the pioneer theorists of
cyberspace were wrong about what could be done there. They thought the
Internet would transform the way we live and love and govern ourselves but
they were right, marginally, only about the first two. Technology may have
altered the way that we interact in an interconnected world, but not the way
we are ruled and the institutions that rule us.
It all started in the last decade
of the last century, when the conventional wisdom was that globalization,
fueled by the Internet, would bring democracy to peoples around the world and
defeat all the tyrants. The theory was that like-minded people could come
together in cyberspace to govern themselves without the help or hindrance of
national governments. The existence of such communities would fatally
undermine the power of traditional territorial
authorities.
If anything, the Internet has proved the opposite.
Goldsmith and Wu both law professors; Goldsmith at Harvard, Wu at Columbia
say the story of the Net so far demonstrates not the existence of a new world
order, but the persistence of the old.
Governments still govern what their citizens do
and what is done to them, even when the actions originate in cyberspace.
Through the force of law and commercial reality, France forced Yahoo Inc. to
stop displaying Nazi trinkets for sale where French people could see them, and
China forced Google Inc. to censor the search results it displays to Chinese
citizens.
Things were not supposed to happen that way. Free speech on
the Web was supposed to be unassailable.
But territorial governments that had endured for hundreds or thousands
of years were not giving up so easily. They used the ancient tools of physical
and commercial coercion to get their way.
At the end of the day, as
Goldsmith and Wu point out, the Internet is nothing but a bundle of wires and
cables, and regulating physical infrastructure is something that governments
do well. They can put pressure on Internet service providers or the financial
intermediaries who fund commerce on the Web, or they can threaten to
confiscate the local assets of multinationals. They make sure that their laws
are obeyed in cyberspace in the same ways as they always have.
Even
China the kind of regime that ought to have been doomed by the Internet, if
the early utopians were right has proved amply capable of controlling
cyberspace within its borders. Now that China is second only to the U.S. in
numbers of Internet users, its critical mass means it can create what amounts
to its own Internet.
"We in the West are used to an Internet that is
free," say the authors before pointing out that this is just an accident of
its birth in the U.S. Other nations can choose other, much more restrictive,
models. The real question,
they
say, is not how
the Internet will affect China, but how China will affect the Internet. They
predict a new Cold War over the widely differing visions of the Internet's
future, from America's free and so far largely unregulated model to China's
controlling vision.
That, they say, is "the other side of
globalization": the fact that different nations, and different peoples, may
want a different kind of Internet, one whose language, content and norms
conform more closely to their own.
That might mean the end of the
Internet as we knew it circa 1990. But it is, on the whole, a good thing.
"Decentralized rule by nation-states reflects what most people want," they say
even in cyberspace.
Patti Waldmeir writes on legal affairs for the
Financial Times, where this review first
appeared.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-books28may28,0,4628873.story?coll=la-home-business
