Call it a tribal article of faith. Ask anyone on the Net about the regulation of cyberspace and they will almost certainly tell you that the Internet is both deregulated and inherently deregulating. The Net is governed by a fiercely libertarian consensus. Should any government try to block to the free flow of information, the Net's decentralised structure throws up a thousand alternative routes. As hacker and cyberactivist John Gilmore famously put it: "The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
But that's not the whole story. True: on the Internet, no one can silence you. They can, however, make the cost of speaking freely pretty high. And the logic of Net freedom cuts both ways. By making information universally accessible, the Internet effectively makes whatever is permitted anywhere permitted everywhere. In the same sense, though, it also threatens to make whatever is forbidden anywhere forbidden everywhere. Resolving the conflict ultimately depends on which travels better - freedom or punishment. These days, punishment is on the move.
In the closing days of 1995, Compuserve temporarily stopped carrying alt.sex and other gay- and sex-related newsgroups because Bavarian police had begun investigating them, and threatened that they might be considered obscene under local law.
Eventually, Compuserve hacked together a technical compromise that locked the newsgroups out of German servers only, and left the rest of the world to read their smut in peace. It's a bit of a sham. Any German on the Internet can still read alt.sex on any number of other servers; indeed an enterprising German Internet subscriber could also telnet into Compuserve's American computers and read it there. But, however long the peace lasts, the story gives the lie to some basic assumptions about the Net's regulation-dissolving qualities.
Not everybody on the Net is willing to take risks for free speech. Compuserve is a case in point. It did not think alt.sex, or a principled fight against censorship, worth the commercial risks of a scrape with the German authorities. Whether you call its decisions craven or merely expedient, the point is that - as the Net becomes increasingly commercial and commercialised - more and more Netizens choose to speak, or not, according to relative economic costs and benefits rather than moral absolutes. This makes them particularly sensitive to threatened punishment - wherever in the world it may arise. Instead of rising to take advantage of the maximum freedom that any of the nearly 200 countries on the Net permits, the dialogue sinks inevitably towards the lowest common denominator.
The outcome of headline-grabbing battles over Net censorship has already been determined by technology. No matter how much Senator Exon or Iran's ayatollahs might wish to drive naked people from the Net, they simply can't - at least not so long as the international telephone system functions and somebody in their jurisdiction has a computer and modem. But beneath the headlines, in the less exciting realms of human expression where neither lust nor morality drives people to talk, are just as many battles waiting to be fought. Ultimately, they may prove the more important - if only because people spend a lot more time talking about toothpaste, cars and other mundane things than about sex and politics.
While activists fight for alt.sex, others have ceded unnoticed to international censorship. A few years ago, Britain's Unipalm wanted to put a financial prospectus onto the Internet; Unipalm's lawyers said no. Although the shares were only offered in Britain, they feared that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would consider publication on the Internet to be 'publication' in the United States. As Unipalm had not gone through SEC approval procedures, this would leave it open to lawsuits from American investors.
Brand marketers are also realising that the Internet's global reach can thrust them straight into global conflict. Not only do advertising standards vary greatly from country to country, but so do consumer protection laws. Christopher Millard, a lawyer at Clifford Chance in London, reckons that bureaucrats and regulators are just now beginning to turn their attentions to the Internet - and he predicts a growing wave of litigation as the enforcers go to court to determine what laws apply where.
If there is any sincerity to politicians' support for the information superhighway, they should act now to reduce legal uncertainties. That will require, first and foremost, humility. Instead of trying to drive misbehaviour from the Net wherever it may be, restrict jurisdiction to the minimum. A voyage across the Net is as much a trip abroad as one on an airliner. So trying to regulate the world's Web sites by any one nation's standards makes as little sense as trying to regulate the world's billboards, for fear that a tourist might see something different abroad than at home.
But, then again, this laissez faire stance assumes that bureaucrats will admit that adults can make up their own minds. Maybe we'd better just expect legal wars over commercial free speech to spring up alongside the political battles already raging over smut.
John Browning (jb@wired.co.uk) is executive editor of Wired UK.
I just came upon a new threat to our children and our quality of life. A journal on nature, the Orion Society Notebook warns us of "the ever growing group of nature photographers who produce glamour shots that in some way debase the natural world. You see this sort of flash-filled, colour-filtered, posed, stagnant photography in certain calendars, greet- ing cards, posters, advertise- ments and on television. These images - called 'eco-porn' by some - distance people from nature." So must I shield my kids from a new Usenet group, alt.pictures.nature.hot? Will the Department of Environmental Conservation start going after photographers of ecosystems younger than 16? Will this be the ideal place for Calvin Klein and Benetton to team up on advertising?Tony Billoni (funboyee@localnet.com) lives and writes in Buffalo, New York.
The UK's Net Book Agreement lies dead in the water. Without guaranteed minimum prices for books, betting is that publishers will focus their energies on high-volume sales and established authors, at the expense of new writers and those who can only hope to appeal to a minority readership. Diversity is under threat - but the Net offers a solution.Companies such as Rank Xerox already market printing machinery designed to interface directly with online libraries. Using this technology, bookshops could move into the business of publication on demand. Fledgling authors could market themselves by posting a chapter of their first novel on to the Net. Anyone wanting to read more could simply get his book store to print a copy. With books to go, less diversity becomes more.
Trevor Clawson (100537.3714@compuserve.com) is a London-based journalist.
Projects such as Iridium and Teledesic will soon send satellites into low-Earth orbit to permit glo-bal cellular connectivity. Much of that bandwidth, however, may go to waste. Each satellite has a small footprint, so its bandwidth can be used only in the narrow geographical area beneath it. Thus, satellite bandwidth will be available over developing countries where there are few customers who can afford it. But this bandwidth could be 'given away,' providing a real boost to global trade.Imagine an Internet bank that allows nearly free access to everybody via satellite. The bank would list buyers and sellers, so the jute grower in Bangladesh could find customers in Malawi.
This would foster international trade and help keep prices down. It would also alleviate the terrible banking and telecom systems that often plague developing countries. The result? Perhaps the Internet spirit will invade the vast commercial world, instead of the other way around.
Arun Mehta (amehta@doe.ernet.in) runs a software consultancy in New Delhi.
There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "information superhighway." They don't know jack about the Net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a bad metaphor.But suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the Net. All right! A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. Two hundred thirty-seven on-ramps at every intersection. No signs. Looking for Deptford? Yell out the window to ask directions. Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes vote to demolish single-occupant vehicles.
No off-ramps.
Now that's the way to run a highway system.
Jim Vandewalker (jimvan@gate.ne) toils for the government in Florida.