Sarai I-Fellowship Posting 3.1 - Review and analysis of "Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Border-less World"

The title of Jack Goldsmith and Timothy Wu's book, "Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Border-less World" puts across their point of view across rather succinctly. They begin by examining the views concerning the Internet during the early and mid Nineties, the initial heady days of the Internet's growth. The Internet was by and large free from any form of regulation by nation states at that point, and the view prevalent then among people connected with the growth of the Internet and users exploring the medium was that the Internet could simply NOT be regulated by nation states. It was a new space as such which was more or less the subject of internal norms and consensus amongst individual stakeholders and away from the realm of law and executive control.

The book goes on to singularly demolish the idea that the Internet today exists as a libertarian paradise. Its argument is that with its growth, the Internet was faced with the simple need to be accommodated in the legal framework laid out by nation states just like previous mediums. While the manner in which these frameworks interacted with the Internet was different from previous new media (especially transmission spectrum based media such as radio and TV), it still worked in a manner which essentially enfolded itself within the rubric of the legal system of the state. Part of the reason for this conceivably seems to be the side-effects of the growth of e-commerce, but a considerable amount of attention came because content on the Internet (i.e. speech and expression) began to draw so much attention and concern, especially due to the reach of the Internet and the fact that it was a new medium/space which few understood, that the State.

As a side comment of my own, we can see that the same also essentially explains the introduction of the Indian State into the sphere of the Internet, with the regulations imposed due to commercial interests (the erstwhile government owned VSNL's attempts to censor Internet telephony) and occasional early police concerns moving on to formalized regulation in the form of the Information Technology Act of 2000, which by and large sought to "facilitate" e-commerce and put in place what may be termed as minimum standards concerning content (not only censoring content, but also legally controlling digital encryption).

I'll talk more about their overall conclusions as part of my next post where I link it up with another book in this area, specifically dealing with a academic understanding of Internet Regulation by Nation States.