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
