Rights, Rules, and Regulations in Cyberspace

From the start, the avant-garde of the new digital culture has regarded attempts by states, international political organizations and businesses to impose external restrictions on the World Wide Web with suspicion and disdain. After all, Web operations follow their own sets of written and unwritten rules, some dictated by its technological architecture, others founded in the nature of human communications, and have done so for years. There are, for example, TCP/IP protocols, which connect individual machines with local networks; domain names, which use both national and generic code; and charters on correct computer utilization and communication, as well. Cyberspace does not need to be operated by a “government” which, by virtue of the powers conferred upon it, might hold special jurisdiction over the virtual community. The rules of this communications universe naturally reflect the political culture and value systems of those who created it, along with the first few hundred thousand Net users. For anyone who has experienced the idiosyncratic discourse developed for and still applied to communication in cyberspace, the nature of these values is obvious. If we had to describe digital culture, we would most likely do so in terms of openness, decenteredness, interactivity, consensual rule, free choice of identity, non-locality, and a categorical rejection of authority, hierarchy and privilege. The creators of this culture maintain that these words mark a new horizon of knowledge, culture, human relations, and political action, while influential Internet theoreticians tend to see themselves, and cybersociety as a whole, as a forum expanding upon the political-philosophical tradition begun by libertarians such as Jefferson, Washington, Paine, Mill, Madison, de Tocqueville, Brandeis, Holmes, and others, amplifying their ideas and bringing them to fruition in cyberspace.

Released: Replika 47–48, 201–225.
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