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In Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford University Press, 2006) Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu challenge the belief that the Internet is--and should remain--a free, borderless, and ungovernable medium. They argue that nations are successfully asserting control over the Internet, that the Internet is as a result becoming bordered by geography, and that these borders are in many instances a positive development that promotes individual freedom and diversity.
Who Controls the Internet? is full of interesting anecdotes and insights, including:
- How eBay's "self-governing community" fundamentally depends on close cooperation with the FBI to keep from being overrun by fraud and related problems.
- How China is exercising brutal control over political speech on the Internet, thus altering the Internet's very nature.
- How search engines like Google and Yahoo! regularly censor searches--not just in China, but in the United States and Europe.
- How the French government forced Yahoo! to stop selling Nazi paraphernalia from Yahoo! servers in the United States, despite the protections of the U.S. First Amendment.
- How music file-sharing services like Kazaa failed because they tried to skirt copyright law, and how Steve Jobs's copyright-compliance strategy helped him take over the music-downloading business.
- How the United States government crushed an attempt by the engineers who founded the Internet to regain control of the Internet's basic architecture.
- How the European Union sets Internet privacy standards for the United States.
How nations are on the dawn of a new Cold War about how the Internet should be regulated.
- How the recent history of the Internet reveals how states are checking the supposed influences of globalization.
Who Controls the Internet? is a lively guide to the fundamental factors shaping the growth of the Internet, and is indispensable reading for understanding modern debates on whether U.S. Internet companies should do business in China, whether Google must turn over its individual search records to the U.S. Justice Department, and whether the United Nations should govern the Internet's basic security and architecture.
Jack Goldsmith is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Tim Wu is a professor of law at Columbia Law School.
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Advance praise for Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World:
"An essential read for anyone who cares about the relationship between technology and globalization."
--Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post
"It is time that America learn an important lesson about the Internet--that however cyber the space is, it is also real, and subject to real space governments. This is the very best work to make this fundamental point. Goldsmith and Wu have made understandable and accessible an argument political culture should have realized a decade ago."
--Lawrence Lessig, author of Code and Free Culture |
