Internet Points of Control

Abstract

Global internet usage famously eludes control. A medium that — when it works — measures distance in clicks rather than kilometres is ill-suited to conforming to a particular government’s set of rules, particularly when data can be hosted in locations far away from a sovereign’s physical reach while still remaining instantly accessible to its web-surfing subjects. Sovereigns have not lost heart, however, and lawmakers’ increasing understanding of just how the internet works is contributing to a process of control that could reassert geopolitical boundaries online. Over the anxieties, if not outright protest, of internet service providers (ISPs) who simply want to route data as quickly as possible to and from their subscribers, a new form of intervention in data flows is emerging. Whatever its merits or problems, this intervention creates an alternative to the following approaches of regulating internet activity: (1) abandoning most regulatory efforts in the belief that the internet is essentially immune to the successful application or enforcement of most land-based laws; (2) regulating the source of internet content, at the risk of having one sovereign’s laws applied to all net users who seek information from that source, unduly transcending rightful jurisdic-tional limits; (3) regulating individual local internet users, requiring costly and intrusive measures to have impact on behaviour; and (4) contemplating sui generis technopolicy organisations with policy-making and enforcement abilities, not anchored in any one sovereign’s laws, to create and apply global policy norms.