[governance] regulating the digital space - whose laws apply, and whose do not

[Paul Lehto]

On 8/30/11, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
> 23:48:31 on Mon, 29 Aug 2011, McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> writes
>>At heart, the Internet is the suite of protocols and standards that
>>allow networks to communicate.  These have never legislated.
>>
>>It's the services that run over these networks and the resulting
>>epiphenomenon that so many seem hell bent on regulating
>
> Not just the services, but the content carried by those services.

The printing press invention by Gutenberg is said to be the most
important invention of the last millenium, and like the internet it
involves the technology of community, facilitating it over a distance
among other things.

Why would the fact that the "heart" of a communications medium is
technological mean anything in terms of whether or not the law can
facilitate such things through what I'm calling structural law (such
as copyright law for printed works), or whether the law can proscribe
abuses of that technology through the criminal law and consumer
protection law (such as proscribing typed death threats, or false
advertising using the printing press)???

The only alleged counter-example to the necessity or inevitability of
law for technology is the example given of Libya, where rebels are
fighting what amounts to a civil war and the internet is said to
continue to run.  So what?  Do printing presses stop making leaflets
during a civil war?   Even if guns or the destruction of printing
presses by force completely replace civil laws, aren't printing
presses still "regulated" during civil war?  I'm not approving that
kind of "regulation" I'm saying that law is inevitably necessary, and
that this law may be good or bad.

I highly suspect, nearly to the point of certainty, that if the
internet presently runs in a meaningful way in Libya, it is in the
hopes of stability of government soon returning to Libya, and based
very much on a gamble in that area.   But, if this is not so, then
Libya must be asserted as a positive example of the kind of system
that we'd like to see everywhere, a kind of lawless state of
"freedom."  Asserting Libya as a positive example strikes me as a
joke, and not a good one.

I can easily imagine a punchline at the end of a brief recitation of
the facts of this discussion about whether or not law is necessary and
inevitable regarding the internet, and the punchline goes like this:
"And then the gentleman from Bulgaria said LIBYA was an example of how
we can have the internet without law!"  This borders on the funny or
laughable.   Is this Libyan example really a state of affairs that we
can support?  Or, is the situation in Libya perhaps something that
news organizations in other countries are depicting in a completely
different way from what we see about Libya's situation in my country
of the USA?

I say that just as the printing press has structural laws to encourage
it (copyright) and to restrict it (defamation and consumer protection
laws) so too does and will the internet have quite similar laws both
supporting and encouraging communication as well as proscribing the
abuses of this communication.  It seems that anybody that would want
the law to be absent from the "heart" of the internet doesn't fully
understand the role of the law. They just have an acute understanding
of the abuses of the law itself, but are missing a robust
understanding of the necessity of the law in its structural and
consumer protection functions.
-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box 1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-4026 (cell)
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