SCN: Web borders

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

========================

(Jonathan D. Glater, NY Times)---If the Internet is anything, at least 
according to its prophets, it is a place without boundaries. Real 
world geography, with tiresome passports and tedious border 
checkpoints, does not matter.  

This is not an appealing notion to many of the world's governments, 
which would much prefer to control the flow of information across 
their national borders, just as they try to control the flow of 
everything else, from people to money. Their distaste for 
borderlessness, in fact, may soon give cyberspace the same jigsaw-
puzzle appearance as the terrestrial world.  

This possibility was highlighted recently when a French judge 
ordered Yahoo Inc. to prevent French Web surfers from accessing 
pro-Nazi sites through Yahoo's popular site on the World Wide 
Web, or from purchasing Nazi memorabilia through its on-line 
auction site. The French court was enforcing French law, even 
though Yahoo is an American company, because its site could be 
viewed on a computer in France.  

If the French court has its way, French law will govern what can be 
viewed on the Web from France - technology permitting. And there's 
nothing to stop other governments from attempting to limit what their 
citizens can see.  

"People really had the idea that the Internet was a different space, 
and that things were going to happen on the Internet that 
governments could not regulate," said Jack Goldsmith, a law 
professor at the University of Chicago. "But, as those governments 
increasingly recognize, their sovereignty is threatened and they're 
doing something about it."  

The issue is complicated by the fact that, while authoritarian nations 
may simply want control over a potentially subversive source of 
information, other nations are worried about protecting their cultural 
identity, said Tony Judt, a history professor at New York University.  

For example, the language of the Internet is overwhelmingly 
English, and its culture is often seen as American. That troubles 
governments concerned about protecting their native culture. In 
France, controlling the on-line world is "about Frenchness," said Mr. 
Judt. "It's the only thing that makes them bigger than they are."  

Not only do governments want to control the ideas that enter their e- 
space; each government has a different idea of which ideas, what 
sort of "content," must be kept out. That is why Yahoo is seeking a 
ruling from an American court that the French decision is 
unenforceable here. Last week, in what it called an unrelated 
development, Yahoo said it would begin to search out and remove 
hateful and violent material from its sites.  

France and Germany want to block Nazi sites (which are now 
relocating to the United States to avoid being shut down). The United 
States tries to prosecute offshore gambling sites. Governments in 
China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and elsewhere try to censor sites for 
political or religious reasons.  

There is a global consensus against very little Web material, for 
example child pornography, said Daniel Weitzner, a lawyer at the 
World Wide Web Consortium. And that is a good thing, from the 
perspective of organizations like the San Francisco-based Electronic 
Frontier Foundation, which promotes online civil liberties.  

A Web world with borders might force users to reveal personal 
information, including their geographical location, which could be 
linked to other data, such as the sites that the user visits. This might 
make people reluctant to visit certain sites, for fear that they may be 
identified, said Shari Steele, an Electronic Frontier Foundation 
lawyer.  

"A lot of times people are looking for information on the Internet that 
they wouldn't want people to know they're looking for," Ms. Steele 
said.  

Nor is this a matter solely of individual freedom, an American 
preoccupation not always shared elsewhere. As Lawrence Lessig, a 
law professor at Stanford University, noted, "The United States 
attempted to sell its conception of the First Amendment to the rest of 
the world for 50 years, and the rest of the world didn't buy it."  

But that is not the reason an open Web should be maintained, said 
William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International's 
United States operations. Other cultures' sensitivities should not 
serve as an excuse to block sites that promote the protection of 
human rights, he said.  

"Now it is virtually impossible for a violation to take place, or at 
least violations in public, in any part of the world without being 
known almost instantaneously around the world," he said. "There 
has been virtually no development in the last five years that has 
been any more important to the success of the human rights 
movement than the growth of the Web."  

For example, the Web allowed Amnesty International to get 
information into China about the Universal Declaration of Human 
Rights and about Chinese human rights violations, despite the 
government's efforts to block them, Dr. Schulz said. The Web also 
has allowed people to organize within some countries, he added.  

Ultimately, however, it is unlikely that the advocates of universal, 
open Internet access will be able to stave off concerted 
governmental efforts, so it is likely that in the not- so-distant future, 
the real-space location of Web users will begin to determine the 
virtual places they can visit.  

On a computer in the United States, it might be possible to "travel," 
under the auspices of the First Amendment, from one pro-Nazi web 
site to another, said Mr. Lessig. But pornography may be blocked. In 
another country, the reverse could be true.  

"This is actually a very medieval conception of jurisdiction: Your 
rights are carried with you as you travel from one place to another," 
Professor Lessig said.  

So the revolutionary advent of the Internet, which has opened the 
minds of so many millions around the globe, may spur a return to 
the Dark Ages. Revolutions, they say, always eat their children.  

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company





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