"The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global-economic zone, borderless and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state. No wonder nation-states are rushing to get their levers of control into cyberspace while less than one per cent of the world's population is online."
John Perry Barlow, Internet activist [1]
The term "cyberspace" was first coined by Vancouver writer William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.[2] It has come to be associated with the Internet, but in fact it extends much farther. Cyberspace is the enormous web of computer communications around the globe. It includes commercial online services such as CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy, and GEnie, many of which are connected to the Internet in one way or another, but operate as separate networks. It includes packet-switched communications networks throughout the world, such as Datapac in Canada, or Tymnet, Sprintnet, and others in the United States. There are local area networks (LANs) connecting computers within one location, and intranets, which duplicate many features of the Internet in a closed environment. Computers may be linked by old-fashioned copper cables, new fibre optic lines, low-orbiting satellites, and microwave relays. Ordinary phone lines, dedicated data lines, cellular phone networks, and even short-wave radio may carry computer data around the globe.
While some may include cyberspace in the "end of geography" phenomenon noted by Richard O'Brien,[3] I argue that cyberspace has a definite geography, albeit one not in the traditional sense of the term. Cyberspace is definitely more accessible to urban dwellers in North America and northern Europe than to people in remote areas of the first and third worlds.[4] It contains thousands of "virtual communities" which stake out their own "territory," even though their members may be scattered around the globe. The Information Highway doesn't stop at border checkpoints, and it transcends territory in the traditional sense. I will discuss here mainly the geography of the Internet, but it must be kept in mind that there are hundreds of other ways for computer data to move through cyberspace. The Internet is only the most popular and extensive data highway. Also, the Internet is continually growing and evolving at a rapid rate. Its present form is unlikely to resemble closely the information highway ten years, or even five years from now. In the future, the lines between television, computers, and telephone networks are likely to be increasingly blurred, and cyberspace will become truly a mass medium.
Just as the railways united vast territories into nations more than a century ago, cyberspace is breaking down traditional nations and forging new global connections. This has confused many politicians and bureaucrats, who still believe that cyberspace can be regulated by national institutions in the same way that radio and television are regulated. Recently the chair of the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission, Françoise Bertrand, suggested that the CRTC should regulate the Internet and insist on quotas for Canadian content.[5] Bertrand is certainly not alone in believing that the Internet can be regulated in the same way that television is. Many European governments believe that national content quotas can be imposed, along with other restrictions normally applied to broadcasters.[6] In the United States, Congress brought in a Communications Decency Act early in 1996 which attempted to eliminate "indecent" material from the Internet. The act was struck down a few months later in a legal challenge, in which it was found to contravene the U.S. Constitution's free speech provisions, but no doubt efforts to remove offensive material by national regulation will continue.[7]
While I do not suggest, as do some, that all regulation of the Internet is completely impossible, I do argue that the Internet is so different from traditional media that attempts to regulate it in the same way as broadcast media will not work. Indeed, any kind of regulation at the national level is bound to be futile in the longer term. Those, such as CRTC chair Bertrand, who believe that national content quotas can be imposed, clearly do not understand the decentralized, borderless, grassroots, and complex nature of the Internet.
There are at least three major obstacles to regulating the Internet:
Of these obstacles, the second two are the most important to this discussion, and they are also the most formidable. Political opposition is likely to be a factor only in some countries, such as the United States, that have a strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech and a libertarian political culture. But even there, the Communications Decency Act was approved by large majorities in both houses of Congress due to the widespread perception among many members of the public that child pornography is rampant on the Internet.[10]
Before discussing the major obstacles to regulation - jurisdiction and technical limitations - we should look at the nature of the Internet itself. The Internet began in 1969 and was originally a U.S. military network known as ARPANET which linked defence contractors and universities.[11] Its decentralized design, in which data can be sent by numerous different routes, was based on earlier research by the Rand Corporation, a Cold War think-tank, intended to make the network resistant to nuclear attack. This same decentralization today makes it extremely difficult for authorities to control its content. Says John Gilmore, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."[12] In 1984, as use of personal computers was rapidly expanding, the Internet was turned over to civilian use. At this point it involved such agencies as the National Science Foundation in the United States, enabling more efficient use of supercomputers at universities and other locations.[13] Throughout the 1980s its use was mainly by academic institutions and scientists, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this began to change rapidly. Use by business and non-profit agencies was rapidly growing. Various private online networks such as CompuServe and America Online began tying into the Internet, initially only to allow exchange of electronic mail, but later to allow complete access to other features of the Internet. At the same time, thousands of private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) sprang up to offer connections to the Internet, normally by modem over telephone lines, to the general public. As well, universities began making complete access to the Internet available to students as well as staff. There is no central control over the Internet, and no one "owns" the network. Rather it is an amalgamation of thousands of businesses and institutions linked by various types of computer connections ranging from ordinary telephone lines to privately owned, but publicly used high-speed communication "backbones."[14]
The Internet is used to communicate globally and locally in a variety of ways. The most common is still probably electronic mail (e-mail). This involves sending of messages in a basic text format known as ASCII from one computer to a receiver at an electronic "address" that may be anywhere in the world. Although limited to this basic text format, it is possible to encode other types of computer files into this text format and to decode them into a binary file at the receiving end. This means that it is also possible to send pictures, software programs, word processor files with complex formatting, and any other type of computer file by electronic mail.
Another important use of the Internet is called Telnet. This enables a user of one computer to log onto another computer in a remote location and run programs on that other computer. His or her own computer then simply behaves as a "dumb terminal" of the remote computer. As an example of this, a user in Canada might Telnet to an online library catalog computer in the United States. A third important use is called File Transfer Protocol (FTP). As the name suggests, this allows a user to transfer (copy) a file from a remote computer to his or her own computer for later use locally. Again, this file might be a software program, computer graphics, sound, multimedia, or simply text.
Probably the most notorious part of the Internet, at least until recently, were the Usenet newsgroups. There are thousands of these newsgroups dedicated to every imaginable topic (and some not so imaginable) from scholarly academic pursuits to the whimsical, to pornography. These function as a kind of bulletin board where users can post messages, called "articles," so that anyone signing onto that news group can read them and respond if they wish. Like e-mail, these "articles" are in the simple ASCII text format, but may also contain encoded binary files that might include pictures, for example. Some of these newsgroups, with names such as alt.sex.bestiality and alt.sex.pedophilia have become notorious and have furthered the impression that the Internet is mainly about pornography and sexual perversion. In fact such newsgroups represent only a very small portion of the more than 10,000 that exist.
In recent years, however, there has been an explosion in the use of the Internet to provide information on a wide variety of topics of academic, official, commercial, and whimsical interest. Starting in 1991, this often took the form of Gopher, a massive system of text information linked hierarchically through numerous menus. For example, many government agencies provided text of important documents in Gopher format, which users could find either by following the menus until they narrowed down the appropriate topic, or by using various types of "search engine" programs to locate information of interest. Later, a more sophisticated way of presenting this information was popularized and became known as the World Wide Web. So popular has the World Wide Web (WWW) become, that now many people equate it with the Internet, even though the Internet assumes numerous other forms. Originally most information on the World Wide Web was presented in "hypertext" format. This meant that a text document would contain various underlined words, which could be selected by the user to provide a "link" to another related document, perhaps providing greater detail on a topic. With the advent of various graphical "browser" programs in recent years, starting with Mosaic in 1993, the WWW has increasingly incorporated graphics and later such multimedia as sound, animation and video images. Such browser programs as Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft Internet Explorer have made access to the Internet very easy for a mass audience, and eliminated the need to know various UNIX commands and other specialized computer skills that were necessary in the Internet's early years.[15]
This brief overview of the Internet, though a bit of a tangent from the topic of electronic money, is necessary in order to understand the geography of cyberspace and the difficulty that governments will have in regulating it. One of the fastest growing areas of commerce in coming years is likely to be on the Internet and on other evolving types of media that are part of the convergence between computers, television and telephones. And this will have enormous impact on the evolution of electronic money at the consumer level, as we shall see in the next chapter. The future of electronic money is intimately connected with the future of cyberspace. For now though, we will look at the geography of cyberspace and the challenge it poses to nation state forms of government.
Because the Internet freely crosses international borders, and carries enormous volumes of data, it has easily carried many types of information that various national governments would like to keep out. And because of its grassroots nature, it is far more difficult for governments to exert control over the millions of people who provide information to the Internet than it is for them to put pressure on such traditional media as newspapers, radio and television. Examples of unwanted information are numerous. In the abortive 1991 coup in the Soviet Union, telephone lines were cut and newspapers stopped. However, Internet links to the outside world via Finland were maintained. This enabled information about the coup to move in and out of the Soviet Union, and contributed to its failure.[16] In the 1994 Chiapas uprising in Mexico, the Zapatista rebels used the Internet with great skill to mobilize international public opinion and to quickly refute the propaganda of the Mexican PRI dictatorship.[17] Exiled communities from countries such as China, Burma, and Saudi Arabia have used the Internet to spread information about repression and human rights violations in those countries.[18] Whistle blowers in many parts of the world have publicized corruption and wrongdoing.[19] Even Canada has found it could not stop prohibited information from reaching Canadians via the Internet. When a court ordered a publication ban on the preliminary hearing of the Karla Homolka murder trial, Canadians were able to get around the ban by reading about the trial from U.S. sources.[20] Germany has laws banning Nazi propaganda, but Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel has made holocaust-denial propaganda available to German readers by posting it on computer servers in the United States, where free speech is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment.[21] And although the United States has laws prohibiting gambling across state boundaries and using telecommunications, it has been unable to stop Americans from gambling at a "virtual casino" run by a Canadian from Caribbean islands where electronic gambling is legal.[22]
In all of the above cases, governments have been powerless to stop the flow of information by legal means. Although the information may be illegal in the country receiving it, it resides on a computer in another country where it is perfectly legal. The old instruments of national jurisdiction no longer work in the borderless geography of global cyberspace. In the absence of international or supranational regulations, governments have had to rely on other means to suppress information on the Internet - either by technological forms of censorship, or by putting pressure on the Internet Service Providers who provide local access to the Internet. While this has worked in a few cases to a limited extent, this approach ultimately is futile also when pursued at the national level. For their part, the service providers claim, justifiably, that they are "common carriers" rather than publishers and so cannot be expected to police they content they deliver.[23] They argue that because of the massive amount of data coming from all directions that they are more like telephone companies, which cannot be expected to be responsible for the signals they deliver. Indeed, it would be beyond the capability of even the larger service providers to monitor the Internet's content. Nonetheless, since they are based within the nation-state's jurisdiction, the service providers are one of the few elements of the Internet over which governments have any leverage.
There is one interesting twist to the jurisdictional obstacle. Because information can be downloaded anywhere, it is possible for plaintiffs sometimes to take legal action in the jurisdiction that is most likely to be favorable to their case. This was highlighted when a postal inspector in the Bible-belt city of Nashville, Tennessee downloaded erotic material from a computer in California and used this to lay charges. The material was judged in terms of the "community standards" in Nashville, instead of California, where it would more likely have been acceptable. This practice of choosing the jurisdiction with the toughest laws is called "forum shopping."[24] While it might work, however, between the different states in the U.S. or even between some countries with treaties, it cannot work at a global level in which some jurisdictions become "data havens."
For a long time Internet enthusiasts boasted that governments could not censor information on the Internet. There was widespread shock then when giant CompuServe bowed to the pressure of the German government of Bavaria in December 1995 and agreed to cut off access to more than 200 Usenet newsgroups dealing with sex.[25] What particularly shocked many libertarian cyberspace enthusiasts was that the decision not only affected CompuServe's 220,000 German users, but all of CompuServe's 4 million customers around the world. CompuServe claimed it could not limit access to just its German users for technical reasons. This raised fears that the restrictive standards in one jurisdiction might be imposed on more liberal jurisdictions, with information being limited to a lowest common denominator. There was an outcry against CompuServe in the international cyber community. The company had perhaps been overzealous in its efforts to appease the German authorities. It had banned a number of newsgroups devoted to serious discussion of sexual issues along with the more offensive ones. Finally, it was forced to back down, restoring access to all but a few of the most offensive newsgroups.
The incident was hailed as evidence that the content of cyberspace could be regulated by those favoring increased regulation. It was, however, not a typical case, and it was far from effective. As a huge international subsidiary of H&R Block Inc., CompuServe was more like the kinds of centralized traditional broadcasters which could be pressured to impose self censorship. It is not typical of the many smaller Internet providers. Furthermore, the decision only affected Usenet newsgroups, which are easily censored if an information provider chooses not to subscribe to them. It did not affect other types of Internet use such as e-mail or the World Wide Web, which are much harder to censor. Finally, any CompuServe customer with fairly basic computer skills could find ways to circumvent the ban. It would simply be a case of using CompuServe to access another remote computer by Telnet, and using this second computer to gain access to the prohibited newsgroups. Alternatively, prohibited information could be disseminated by means of an automated e-mail mailing list.
There are millions of e-mail messages sent, millions of pages on the World Wide Web, and thousands of Usenet newsgroups, with many new ones appearing daily. Authorities who believe they can restrict or regulate content in the manner that centralized media such as radio and television are controlled simply don't understand how different the Internet is. It is no more practical to regulate global information on the Internet than it is to control what citizens say on the telephone.
It is more difficult, though not impossible, for governments to restrict access to offensive parts of the World Wide Web. But here again, computer users can easily circumvent restrictions. Information on the WWW is stored on "pages," and each "page" has its own unique address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). There are software products that allow parents to shield their children from material they consider offensive by blocking access to certain URLs. Depending on the software, with names such as SurfWatch, CyberPatrol, or NetNanny, sites containing specific words tagged as offensive may be blocked, or companies may physically screen numerous sites considered offensive.[26] Prodigy, for example, uses software to screen 75,000 messages per day looking for offensive words.[27] The problem with this approach, as is often pointed out, is that such software often cannot distinguish between a serious discussion of "breast" cancer detection and titillating discussion of "breasts."
States seeking to repress sensitive information use a similar approach, prompting The Economist to brand countries such as China and Singapore "NetNanny States."[28] These countries face the dilemma that they want to be part of the information economy, but their repressive regimes also want to limit the access of their citizens to politically sensitive information and even soft pornography. In September 1996, China blocked access to more than 100 sites on the World Wide Web, including American newspapers, Tibetan exiles, the Taiwanese government, Playboy, and The Economist.[29] One problem is that such censorship tends to slow down access to other sites. Another problem, again, is that these blocks can be easily circumvented. Often information contained on one web site may be "mirrored" somewhere else on the Internet, allowing users to access it on a computer, perhaps in a third country, that may not have been blocked. The difficulty that national governments have regulating an international medium such as the Internet is highlighted in an offer made by a pro-free-speech Australian librarian to an American librarian: "Anything which gets banned in the U.S. we can mount for you, provided you mount the stuff that is banned here," he said.[30] Information can be sent by other means, for example e-mail or FTP, that is more difficult to screen, and e-mail may be sent through strings of anonymous remailers making it impossible to trace.[31] Software may be able to scan quickly massive amounts of computer text looking for words that censors want to block, but no software yet can identify offensive pictures, which are, after all, sent just as massive amounts of binary code that form pixels when displayed on a computer screen. A further impediment to censors is that Internet data is normally "packet-switched." This means it is broken up into "packets" of about 200 characters which are sent separately, depending on what channels are available. These are mixed in with numerous other packets from other users, and different packets of the same message or file may even take different routes to the destination. They are sorted out and routed by information contained in each packet called a "header."[32] This makes interception of data en route difficult and sometimes impossible. Furthermore, text can easily be sent in encrypted form, which would require enormous efforts using supercomputers for authorities to decode.[33] As quickly as authorities can find ways to block information, some of the best minds in cyberspace are developing new ways to bypass censorship. Says computer columnist James Martin: "Internet regulation won't work for this hyper-decentralized network because damage to one node doesn't interrupt communications. Messages are simply routed around the damaged node. Censorship and regulations are treated as damage to be bypassed. Internet servers will sprout in data havens such as the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein to offer verboten content and transactions."[34]
By suggesting that Internet servers could move to offshore data havens, Martin and other observers obviously have in mind the way that Euromarket banking in the 1960s and 1970s moved offshore to avoid national regulation. It is a pattern that is likely to be repeated in other ways in the future, further eroding the power of nation states.
1. John Perry Barlow, "Thinking locally, acting globally," Time, Jan. 15, 1996, Vol. 147, No. 3, p. 76
2. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, "Welcome to Cyberspace," Time, Spring 1995, p. 4
3. Richard O'Brien, Global financial Integration: The End of Geography, (London: Pinter Publishers, 1992)
4. Associated Press, "Folks Just Want a Dial Tone," Associated Press newswire, Feb. 9, 1996, 22:42 EST; James O. Jackson, "It's a wired, wired world," Time, Spring 1995, pp. 78-80
5. Southam News, "CRTC may regulate Internet, chair says," Edmonton Journal, Nov. 15, 1996, p. C9
6. John Browning, "Cyber View: Television by Any Other Name," Scientific American, October 1996, p. 40
7. Joshua Quittner, "Free speech for the Net: a panel of federal judges overturns the Communications Decency Act," Time, Jun. 24, 1996, Vol. 147, No. 26, p. 56 (2); American Libraries, "Federal court rejects Communications Decency Act," American Libraries, Aug. 1996, Vol. 27, No. 7, p. 11
8. Economist, "Right turn in cyberspace," The Economist, Aug. 26, 1995, pp. 67-68
9. Laurianne McLaughlin, "Censorship Showdown," PC World, May 1996, Vol. 14, No. 5, p. 51; Associated Press, "Lawsuit Argues Internet Rights," Associated Press newswire, Feb. 25, 1996, 18:19 EST
10. The impression that pornography is rampant on the Internet was fueled by a cover story in Time: Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Cyberporn," Time, Jul. 3, 1995. The article, however, was based on a study which has been seriously questioned in its methodology and conclusions. The study was conducted by an undergraduate student, and not subject to peer review, and has been used for propaganda purposes by fundamentalist Christian organizations. See Gary Chapman, "Not so naughty," The New Republic, July 31, 1995, p. 11
11. Elmer-DeWitt, "Welcome to Cyberspace," 9; Bruce Sterling, "Short History of the Internet," Internet Gopher document originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Feb. 1993.
12. This phrase is often quoted on the Internet and in the media. See for example: Economist, "Lawless: Too Many Loopholes in the Net?" The Economist, Internet Survey, July 1, 1995, Vol. 336, No. 7921, p. S15 (3); Howard Rheingold, "Futility in cyberspace: why attempts to censor the Net are doomed," Whole Earth Review, Winter 1994, No. 84, p. 94 (2)
13. Joshua Eddings, "How the Internet Works," (Emeryville, CA: Ziff-Davis Press, 1994), p. 9
14. Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Hal Varian, "Economic FAQs About the Internet," Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 8, No. 3, Summer 1994, pp. 75-96
15. An excellent timeline of the Internet's development, "Hobbes' Internet Timeline v2.5," by Robert Hobbes Zakon could be found at: http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html (no longer active link).
16. John R. Levine and Carol Baroudi, "The Internet for Dummies," (San Mateo, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, 1993), p. 8
17. Deedee Halleck, "Zapatistas On-Line," NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept.-Oct. 1994, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 30-32; Isabel Vincent, "Rebel Dispatches On the Net," World Press Review, Oct. 1996, pp. 23-24, originally published in Toronto Globe and Mail, June 11, 1996
18. Grant Peck, "Activists take to cyberspace," Associated Press newswire, Apr. 22, 1995, 12:00 EDT; Jerome Socolovsky, "E-mail used by Saudi Exiles," Associated Press newswire, Apr. 22, 1995, 12:00 EDT
19. Todd Copilevitz, "Getting dirt on-line can be dirt cheap," Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 20, 1996, p. C8, originally from Dallas Morning News
20. Mitch Betts, "Info leaks," Computerworld, June 5, 1995, p. 16
21. Associated Press, "AOL added to neo-Nazi probe," Associated Press newswire, Feb. 2, 1996, 17:39 EST
22. Mitch Betts and Gary H. Anthes, "On-line boundaries unclear: Internet tramples legal jurisdictions," Computerworld, June 5, 1995, pp. 1, 16; Associated Press, "Some are betting on gambling in cyberspace," Associated Press newswire, Jun. 7, 1995, 09:24 EDT; David Klein and Kourosh Karimkhany, "Internet casinos to offer on-line gambling service," Bloomberg Business News, Mar. 15, 1995, 16:36
23. Economist, "Lawless: Too Many Loopholes in the Net?" p. S15(3); This argument was rejected by a New York state court in a ruling against Prodigy for libel, however, the case was somewhat different from the norm in the Prodigy does edit content, and so could be classed as a "publisher". See: Associated Press, "Judge deals blow to Prodigy," Associated Press newswire, May 25, 1995, 18:29 EDT; Ellis Booker and Gary H. Anthes, "Prodigy ruling could chill IS plans," Computerworld, June 5, 1995, Vol. 29, No. 23, p. 1
24. Betts and Anthes, "Internet tramples legal jurisdictions," p. 16; Economist, "Lowest-common-denominator censorship," Globe and Mail, Jan. 6, 1996, p. D6, originally published in The Economist.
25. Associated Press, "CompuServe Axes Few Newsgroups," Associated Press newswire, Dec. 29, 1995, 11:36 EST; John Perry Barlow, "Thinking locally, acting globally," Time, Jan. 15, 1996, Vol. 147, No. 3, p. 76
26. Noah Robischon, "Software filters: how well do they work?" Time, Jun. 24, 1996, Vol. 147, No. 26, p. 57
27. Chip Rowe, "Censorship Glossary," Playboy, July 1995, vol. 42, no. 7, p. 48; Todd Lappin, "Aux Armes, Netizens!" The Nation, Feb. 26, 1996, Vol. 262, No. 8, p. 6
28. Economist, "NetNanny States," The Economist, Sept. 14, 1996, p. 34; Renee Schoof, "China is leery of Internet," Associated Press newswire, Apr. 14, 1996, 12:01 EDT; Leonard Kniffel, "Beijing determined to censor outside voices - on and off the Net," American Libraries, May 1996, Vol. 27, No. 5, p. 28; Associated Press, "China: Web Users Must Register," Associated Press newswire, Feb. 14, 1996, 11:55 EST; Associated Press, "Singapore to police Internet," Associated Press newswire, Mar. 5, 1996, 8:21 EST; Associated Press, "Singapore PM: Beware Internet," Associated Press newswire, Mar. 7, 1996, 1:11 EST
29. Economist, "NetNanny States," The Economist, Sept. 14, 1996, p. 34
30. Karen G. Schneider, "Come On, Get Happy!" American Libraries, April 1996, Vol. 27, No. 4, p. 70 (2)
31. Gary Chapman, "Net Gain," The New Republic, July 31, 1995, p. 10; Vic Sussman, "Policing Cyberspace," U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 23, 1995, p. 58; Peter H. Lewis, "Computer jokes and threats ignite debate on anonymity," New York Times, Dec. 31, 1994, pp. 1, 53
32. MacKie-Mason and Varian, "Economic FAQs About the Internet," pp. 79-82
33. Chapman, "Net Gain," pp. 10-12; Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, pp. 203-12; Sussman, "Policing Cyberspace," pp. 57-58
34. James Martin, "Political Barriers Can't Stop the Internet," Computerworld, Mar. 25, 1996, Vol. 30, No. 13, p. 37
© 1996 Richard McGuire
Last updated Nov. 29, 1996