Territory
We cannot pass a law in our country that would prevent the people in the neighbouring country playing Beethoven within earshot. Sound has a habit of ignoring the border, and if it’s going to interfere with my enjoyment of Chopin then rather than try to make the disturbance illegal, maybe I could just go indoors. While it is obviously silly to think that local laws have universal applicability, some still behave as if this were true. Particularly in the Internet space where we see many examples of physical territories trying to legislate for the whole Internet. It’s almost as if the individual countries believed that anything they can perceive on the Internet must be happening “in their country” and therefore subject to their laws, or perhaps they believe the Internet is a physical entity that can exist in one place, or worse: perhaps they believe they own the Internet.
In some countries there are laws about what you can say about politicians in that country, and the law extends to sites operated by people/companies that are subject to their laws. There are privacy laws in different territories that are being applied to Internet services wherever they have their offices. (Facebook recently found itself subject to European laws in this area.) The most recent example of such thinking is SOPA, a proposed bill that would give Americans the “right” to immediately disconnect any Web site, anywhere in the world, on the basis of mere accusations of misconduct. The people at CNET are maintaining a good summary of the implications of this proposed bill.
Maybe the Internet should be declared a Virtual Territory, with its own resources, its own currency, its own laws and sanctions. It would import a lot of networking equipment and support services, and its sole export would be data… Silly thinking perhaps, but the alternative is that we continue to believe that the Internet is (part of) our territory, when in fact it’s more like Beethoven drifting on the wind.
Categorised as: Legal and Political