Jonathan Zittrain has a paper up on SSRN that discusses Internet jurisdiction issues. He describes efforts to change the Internet architecture from global to local.
Local Internet is not the default. It requires efforts at control.
And as with the Berlin wall, the one hole rule applies. One hole in a Internet wall around a repressive country is enough to assure freedom of access to blocked information.
Zittrain describes two ways of achieving local Internet. At the source and at a wall around a country. He does not discuss this third one:
Let's take gambling as an example. Assume that in some country X Internet gambling is illegal to protect the profits government-owned gambling services make in inefficient monopolistic structures.
Then X could ask all Internet gambling companies to set up their servers to exclude gamblers residing in X. And they could build a wall around X to deny access to known gambling sites.
They could however also just outlaw the use of the gambling sites and listen in to the Internet traffic. Don't deny the connections. Keep a log file instead. And then use that log file to indict the gamblers.
There are several conditions for this to work, the first one being: X must be able to watch the Internet traffic of its citizens.
So the discussion about retention of traffic data is relevant also for the jurisdiction debate. I oppose traffic data retention as violating the human right to confidential communication. However, the default structure of the Internet is one of keeping log files (compare to radio or television, where no individual records of media use are kept).
This might be a third potential way to enforce local laws against the own citizens regarding Internet content which is legal abroad. It depends on the level of protection for confidential and anonymous Internet use in a country, which might be lowest in those countries most likely to want a more local Internet, like the examples of China and Saudi Arabia Zittrain discussed.
And for all we know it might be happening right now.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at April 20, 2003 09:31 PM | TrackBack