Grounding Internet theory.

WHO CONTROLS THE INTERNET?: ILLUSIONS OF A BORDERLESS WORLD

BY JACK GOLDSMITH AND TIM WU

OXFORD AND NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006

226 PP./$28.00 (HB)

Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World challenges sentimental assumptions about communication technologies by investigating the continued relevance of geography and governmental coercion on global communication technologies, the splitting apart of the Internet to meet local conditions, and the underappreciated virtues of a geographically bordered Internet. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, professors of law at Harvard and Columbia universities respectively, begin Who Controls the Internet? with an epigraph extolling the immediacy and effortlessness of telegraph communications, which, according to nineteenth-century sentimentalism, practically obliterated political geography and made free trade universal. A century later, they point out, twentieth-century sentimentalism invested the Internet with comparable possibilities. Scholarship, journalism, and publicity materials theorized the new medium "as the leading edge of a new globalization that was eroding the authority and relevance of national governments" and marked its arrival "to herald a new way of ordering human affairs that would free us forever from the tyranny of territorial rule" (vii). Much as nineteenth-century cosmopolites had been, twentieth-century Internet users were envisioned as free from the constraints of ordinary nation-bound life.

Contours of debates about control over the Internet are defined by two different responses by United States-based Internet service providers (ISPs) to pressures originating in France to remove content considered illegal under French law. In 1998, America Online (AOL) closed its customers' neo-Nazi sites in what Goldsmith and Wu describe as an atypical response by an ISP to foreign law. AOL argues that the decision partially reflects the location of their headquarters in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where businesses are savvy about the politics of public relations. By contrast, Silicon Valley-based Yahoo! ignored pressures from French judges to block its customers from auctioning Nazi memorabilia in 2000, suggesting an anything-for-profit ethic. The cases, however, point to more than regional differences in business practices; they point to differences in national law. France bans the trafficking of Nazi goods; the U.S. does not. Yahoo! declared itself a defender of "free speech," but ultimately conceded when French courts threatened seizure of their assets in France. The irony, Goldsmith and Wu suggest, is not only that national borders still matter, but also that the bravado of Yahoo!'s indifference to French anti-racism laws quickly turned into Yahoo!'s acquiescence to Chinese anti-democracy censorship laws after Google superseded Yahoo! as the dominant search engine in the U.S. and the value of Yahoo! stock plummeted. They explain, "The Yahoo! story encapsulates the Internet's transformation from a technology that resists territorial law to one that facilitates its enforcement" (10).

Goldsmith and Wu also trace the Internet's design as an "open architecture" network that resists centralized control with user-friendly applications such as e-mail and the World Wide Web, which facilitate end-to-end communication. Early efforts to govern the Internet were decentralized, based upon "bottom-up" consensus among users, rather than "top-down" commands from governments. Although information was intended to flow freely across national borders, the Internet's very design lends itself to territorial and extraterritorial control by national and international law. Internet havens for activities considered illegal in one nation-state--child pornography or criticism of the government, for example--can be controlled, even when these activities are located outside that nation-state, by controlling local intermediaries, such as ISPs or credit card companies. Just as nation-states control crime by threatening citizens with punishments, nation-states control the international flow of information on the Internet by threatening intermediaries with financial fines. The Internet's architecture is designed to block information, yet cybercrimes complicate the enforcement of national laws. Due to different national laws, the programmer of the "iloveyou" virus, for example, could not be extradited to the U.S., nor prosecuted in the Philippines where the virus originated. "The most basic questions about the bordered Internet," Goldsmith and Wu contend, "is whether speech should be regulated globally or locally" (150). They point to the provincial assumptions of many U.S. scholars and journalists that "free speech"--particularly as it is protected by the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution--reflect "universal values" or is written into the architecture of the Internet (157).

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So who controls the Internet? Drawing upon Lawrence Lessig's premise that "code is law," Goldsmith and Wu argue that nation-states can control the Internet through code in both progressive and oppressive ways. Information can be filtered, domain names can be seized, corporations can be fined, individuals can be arrested. If there is a "global law," they argue that the domain name system would be the code that functions as law. Without correlation between Internet Protocol addresses, such as 192.168.1.2, and domain names, such as pseudointeractive.com, there is no Internet. The U.S. government maintains control over the root authority, having rescinded its offer to relinquish control to the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in June 2005. Not surprisingly, many consider the imposition of U.S. Internet policy as unfair, a violation of national sovereignty. One of the most ironic manipulations of U.S.-determined global policy against U.S. interests is the case of Antigua's online gambling industry, which was protected by the World Trade Organization (WTO) despite the U.S. government's efforts to block access to these Web sites for U.S. citizens (172).

Goldsmith and Wu contribute to Internet scholarship in a format that is accessible to a general readership and relevant to anyone who uses e-mail, surfs the Web, or shops online. They introduce legal precedents that have shaped the Internet with anecdotes about the people involved, restoring a physical dimension to a field that has historically been theorized as purely abstract. Human bodies can be coerced, physical property can be confiscated, national laws cannot be ignored entirely. By connecting the theoretical and the tangible, Goldsmith and Wu underscore tensions between territorialization, de-territorialization, and re-territorialization of the Internet according to language, technological developments, national law, and political geography. They integrate aspects of uneven and unequal access to the Internet with questions of communication control. If they could expand this volume, further discussion of the ways that transnational corporations circumvent national law, as well as a discussion of data collection about citizens by governments via Internet technologies, would be welcome. Alas, the Internet has no more obliterated political geography and facilitated universal free trade (much less fair trade) than the telegraph did a century earlier. Much to the contrary, the Internet has only reinforced the need for certain national and international laws to protect democratic, rather than libertarian, exchanges of communication, commodities, and capital, perpetuating a little of the previous centuries' sentimentalism.

DALE HUDSON is a visiting assistant professor of cinema studies in the department of English at Amherst College, Massachusetts.