LAW FOR CYBERSPACE?
1. The ability of the World Wide Web to penetrate every home and community across the globe has both positive and negative implications.
2. While it can be an invaluable source of information and means of communication, it can also override community values and standards, subjecting them to whatever more may or may not be found online.
3. The Internet is a challenge to the sovereignty of civilized communities, States, and nations to decide what are appropriate and decent behaviour.[1]
4. The legal debate over the regulation of Internet speech is far from settled, but its layers of complexity shed light on the issues at the heart of the larger discussion about regulation of the Internet and the law of cyberspace.
5. Notwithstanding the intense academic debate, as a practical manner, the sheer size of the Internet – whether measured by its explosively expanding user base, economic significance, or cultural impact- seems to make some form of Internet regulation both unavoidable and desirable. [2]
6. Law might approach cyberspace as a sui generis phenomenon and deliberately avoid applying policy or precedent from other fields, reasoning instead from principles based on some ‘true’ understanding of the internet itself.
7. Thus, some courts and scholars have tried to address legal issues in cyberspace or on the internet by focusing on technical characteristics of the network or digital technology rather than on human experiences situated in it.
8. This perspective includes arguments that cyberspace analysis should focus on the relevant technical ‘layer’ of the internet involved in a particular policy or litigation problem.
9. A different solution suggests deconstructing cyberspace into categories defined by theoretical abstractions.[3]
10. Theoretical, technical and metaphorical approaches tend to assume the existence of an object- ‘cyberspace’ or ‘the internet’, whether those are one thing or two – that is both fixed and distinct.
11. If that characterization continues to make sense remains to be seen.
12. We think and act as if there is ‘an internet’ and ‘cyberspace’, but the border between how people use the internet (or experience cyberspace), and the internet or cyberspace itself, from a technical standpoint, is increasingly blurry.
13. And neither cyberspace nor the internet is static. [4]
[1] Harv. L. Rev., Developments in the Law, 112 Harvard Law Review 1574 (1999), online, accessed on 23.12.2005, available at http://www.web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?
[2] Supra.
[3] Michael J.M., The Narratives of Cyberspace Law (or, learning From Casablanca),(2004) 27 The Columbia
[4] Supra.
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