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

[McTim]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Paul Lehto <lehto.paul at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think you missed my point.  TCP/IP is ~40 years old.  It has never
been enshrined in any laws AFAIK.  Would you seek to regulate it now?


-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
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