In retrospect, 2000 may well be the year when governments started to regulate cyberspace in earnest; 

  • In Britain the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act grants the police extensive powers to   access citizens’ e-mail and electronic communications;
  • In South Korea, access to gambling websites has been outlawed;
  • In the United States schools and libraries that receive federal funds for Internet connections must install software to block material “harmful to the young”; 
  • On November 20th, a French court ordered Yahoo! to implement safeguards that prohibit French users from seeing Nazi memorabilia posted on its American sites, or face a daily fine of $13,000.

Leading Internet advocate John Perry Barlow in his 1996 “Declaration of Independence of cyberspace”  declared that  “You [governments] have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” Even Libertarians argued in that same year that cyberspace was a distinct place requiring laws and legal institutions entirely of its own.

But do governments always need new technology to exercise their regulatory muscle? They can also coerce human intervention:

  • Yahoo! now intends to ban auctions of Nazi and Ku Klux Klan items on its site by the use of software  filters and human reviewers to decide borderline cases. 
  • China recently published sweeping new rules that require licensing of Internet companies to hold them responsible for illegal content carried on their websites. 
  • Democratic governments can do an end-run to regulate illegal commercial activity, such as online gambling, through credit-card companies and other financial intermediaries.
  • In Myanmar, the country's military regime imposes jail terms of up to 15 years for the unauthorized use of a modem.

And through coordinated action some control may be gained over the online world by banding together to fight the threat of jurisdictional arbitrage and to solve conflicts of law. The most straightforward approach to do that is to devise uniform international standard agreements.  Some of these efforts are benign.  Others might have sinister undercurrents:

  • A benign example is the World Intellectual Property Organization’s copyright treaty of 1996, which strengthened international copyright rules;
  • An example of one that might have sinister consequences, although on the surface it looks to be in  the interest of freedom, is the Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT).

Voice of America announced to the world that “The U.S. State Department has set up a task force to investigate the threats that repressive regimes pose to the free flow of information and ideas over the Internet. Josette Shiner, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs, says the goal ‘is ensuring maximum access to information’”.

On the surface, that is great news.  But is this a two-edged sword in a sheepskin scabbard?  One has to wonder if the Bush regime falls within its scope of investigation.