The God of the Internet

If you had met Jon Postel in 1998, you might have been surprised to learn that you were in the presence of one of the Internet’s greatest living authorities. He had a rambling, ragged look, living in sandals and a large, unkempt beard. He lived like a modern-day Obi-Wan Kenobi, an academic hermit who favored solitary walks on the Southern California beach. When told once by a reporter that readers were interested in learning more about his personal life, he answered: “If we tell them, they won’t be interested anymore.” Yet this man was, and had been for as long as anyone could remember, the ultimate authority for assignment of the all-important Internet Protocol (IP) numbers that are the essential feature of Internet membership. Like the medallions assigned to New York City taxicabs, each globally unique number identifies a computer on the Net, determining who belongs and who doesn’t. “If the Net does have a God,” wrote the Economist in 1997, “he is probably Jon Postel.” Jon Postel was a quiet man who kept strong opinions and sometimes acted in surprising ways. The day of January 28, 1998, provided the best example. On that day Postel wrote an e-mail to the human operators of eight of the twelve “name servers” around the globe. Name servers are the critical computers that are ultimately responsible for making sure that when you type a name like google.com you reach the right address (123.23.83.0). On that day Postel asked the eight operators, all personally loyal to Postel, to recognize his computer as the “root,” or, in essence, the master computer for the whole Internet. The operators complied, pointing their servers to Postel’s computer instead of the authoritative root controlled by the United States government. The order made the operators nervous—Paul Vixie, one of the eight, quietly arranged to have someone look after his kids in case he was arrested. Postel was playing with fire. His act could have divided the Internet’s critical naming system into two gigantic networks, one headed by himself, the other headed by the United States. He engineered things so that the Internet continued to run smoothly. But had he wanted to during this critical time, he might have created chaos.

Visions of a Post–Territorial Order

A decade before the Yahoo case, two men in different parts of America began to use the Internet for the first time. One was Julian Dibbell, a New Yorker and pop music writer who covered technology issues for the Village Voice. The other was John Perry Barlow of Wyoming, a libertarian, lyricist, and cattle rancher who looked the years he had spent traveling with the Grateful Dead. Dibbell and Barlow were very different people. Dibbell, born in the 1960s, was a member of what people in the ’90s called Generation X. Barlow was writing rock-and-roll songs when Dibbell was born, and he never lost the passion or political purpose of the 1960s. But the two had this in common: neither were native computer geeks, and both were lucid, even lyrical writers who wanted to communicate the Internet experience to regular people. In popular magazines like Wired and the Village Voice, they did just this. Dibbell and Barlow became the great explorers of the cyberspace age. Like Henry Stanley, the Welsh-American journalist who famously recounted his expeditions in Africa, Dibbell and Barlow had discovered an exotic place and wanted to tell others about it. As with any explorers, the tales they brought back reflected their own experience and assumptions more than objective reality. Nonetheless, these stories articulated a powerful vision: a new frontier, where people lived in peace, under their own rules, liberated from the constraints of an oppressive society and free from government meddling. Through the writings and actions of Dibbell, Barlow, and others, this chapter and the next depict the era when it was widely believed that cyberspace might challenge the authority of nation-states and move the world to a new, post-territorial system. Today, notions of a selfgoverning cyberspace are largely discredited. But the historical significance of these ideas cannot be ignored. They had an enormous impact on Internet writers and thinkers, firms, and even the U.S. Supreme Court—an influence that is still with us today. To understand the reality and forgotten virtues of territorial government, we must first understand the possibilities and attractions of a place once called cyberspace.

Introduction: Yahoo!

Marc Knobel is a French Jew who has devoted his life to fighting neo-Nazism, a fight that has taken him repeatedly to the Internet and American websites. In February 2000, Knobel was sitting in Paris, searching the Web for Nazi memorabilia. He went to the auction site of yahoo.com, where to his horror he saw page after page of swastika arm bands, SS daggers, concentration camp photos, and even replicas of the Zyklon B gas canisters. He had found a vast collection of Nazi mementos, for sale and easily available in France but hosted on a computer in the United States by the Internet giant Yahoo. Two years earlier, Knobel had discovered Nazi hate sites on America Online and threatened a public relations war. AOL closed the sites, and Knobel assumed that a similar threat against Yahoo would have a similar effect. He was wrong. AOL, it turned out, was atypical. Located in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, AOL had always been sensitive to public relations, politics, and the realities of government power. It was more careful than most Internet companies about keeping offensive information off its sites. Yahoo, in contrast, was a product of Silicon Valley’s 1990s bubble culture. From its origins as the hobby of Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo by 2000 had grown to be the mighty “Lord of the Portals.” At the time, Yahoo was the Internet entrance point for more users than any other website, with a stock price, as 2000 began, of $475 per share. Yang, Yahoo’s billionaire leader, was confident and brash—he “liked the general definition of a yahoo: ‘rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.’” Obsessed with expanding market share, he thought government dumb, and speech restrictions dumber still. Confronted by an obscure activist complaining about hate speech and invoking French law, Yang’s company shrugged its high-tech shoulders. Mark Knobel was not impressed. On April 11, 2000, he sued Yahoo in a French court on behalf of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism and others. Yahoo’s auctions, he charged, violated a French law banning trafficking in Nazi goods in France.

The Filesharing Movement

Some people change history by accident, and Niklas Zennstrom counts as one of them. This soft-spoken and still largely unknown Swede, described by the Washington Post as a “younger, hipper version of Bill Gates,” started two small companies in the early 2000s that have already done much to change how people exchange information in the twenty-first century. His first company created a filesharing software application called “Kazaa” that was destined to become the most downloaded program in history. Millions of people used Kazaa to exchange billions of songs in open defiance of national copyright laws. This chapter chronicles the filesharing movement, in which Zennstrom and Kazaa played a big role. At its height this movement led many to believe that filesharing might upend the central role of national copyright law in the distribution of information. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that this was not to be. And so in part, this chapter is a sequel to chapters 5 and 6, showing again the importance of law and national government, even for filesharing—a technology designed to be impossible to control. This chapter also introduces a crucial new theme: the effect of technological change on the market and the legal system. Filesharing introduced a cheaper method of distributing music that sparked massive changes in the economics of music distribution and the behavior of consumers. These changes were a jolt to the copyright law system that seemed to many to render it irrelevant. What appeared a threat to copyright law, however, turned out simply to be the law’s hesitation and adjustment in the face of a massive battle between the recording industry, technological upstarts, and music consumers over the spoils of a better music distribution system made possible by the Internet. As the 1990s ended, the music recording industry’s mood was optimistic. A new and sturdy technology, the compact disc, anchored the best decade of sales ever. A handful of major labels, a textbook oligopoly, exercised near total control over the distribution of music. And while the industry faced considerable expenses in the development and marketing of new artists, existing music cost little to manufacture and could be sold for up to $20 per album. The recording industry was rich, powerful, well-connected in Congress, and uninterested in changing a successful business model.

China

“Long live prostitutes” was the title of Wang’s posting. Fifteen years old, living in China, and full of teenage bluster, Wang had collected fifty-four reasons to think Chinese politicians worse than prostitutes. The list included:… • There is no indicator that prostitutes will disappear, but there are many indicators that the government will collapse. • Prostitutes allow others to oppose them, unlike the government which arrests opposition and “re-educates” them through labor. • Prostitutes have no power, unlike those who use their power to suppress others. • Prostitutes do not need you to love them, unlike that group which forces you to love it. • Prostitutes win customers with credibility, unlike those who maintain power with lies. • Prostitutes sell flesh, unlike those who sell soul…. Liu Di was a psychology student at Beijing Normal University who called herself the “Stainless Steel Mouse” and ran an “artist’s club” through her personal website. In 2002, in one of her many stunts, the twenty-two-year-old urged her followers to distribute Marxist literature:… Let’s conduct an experiment of behavioral art: disseminating communism on the street! We can print copies of “The Communist Manifesto.” However, we should take “Communist” out of the title. Then, like sociologists, we ask people on the street to sign their names onto the Manifesto…. Liu Di wrote an essay titled “How a national security apparatus can hurt national security.” Echoing typical criticism of governments everywhere, she called China’s security apparatus “limitless,” or possessed of “a tendency to expand, without limits, its size and functions.” Wang’s message and the writings of Liu Di appeared on obscure Internet sites. Nonetheless, they came to the attention of the Chinese authorities and provoked swift action. Soon after Wang posted his message, it was deleted. He was arrested in Henan and subjected to an unspecified punishment. Wang’s story was printed in the People’s Daily as a warning, with the headline “15-Year-Old Youth Punished For Making Reactionary Argument That the Government is Prostitute” The State Security Protection Bureau arrested Liu Di on her university campus on November 7, 2002.

How Governments Rule the Net

In 1966 a retired British Major named Paddy Roy Bates took a liking to a small, abandoned concrete platform in the North Sea nicknamed “Rough’s Tower.” Rough’s Tower was a World War II gun tower used by the British to fire at German bombers on their way to London. By 1966, nobody wanted the rusting contraption, so Bates renamed it the “Principality of Sealand” and declared independence from the United Kingdom, six miles away. He awarded himself the title of Prince Roy, and proceeded to issue Sealand passports and Sealand stamps with pictures of his wife, Joan, an ex-beauty queen. Sealand has had a colorful history, but before 1999, nothing suggested that a chunk of concrete and steel off the English coast might have anything to do with the history of the Internet. That year, Bates agreed to let a young man named Ryan Lackey move to Sealand and begin transforming it into a “data haven.” Lackey’s company, “HavenCo,” equipped Sealand with banks of servers, and Internet links via microwave and satellite connections. Borrowing an idea from cyberpunk fiction, HavenCo aimed to rent computer space on Sealand to anyone who wanted to escape the clutches of government. It promised potential clients—porn purveyors, tax evaders, Web gambling services, independence movements, and just about any other government-shy Internet user—that data on Sealand servers would be “physically secure against any legal action.” HavenCo, the company boasted, would be “the first place on earth where people are free to conduct business without someone looking over their shoulder.” HavenCo was the apotheosis of the late 1990s belief in the futility of territorial government in the Internet era. Lackey’s company was premised on the commonplace assumption that governments cannot control what happens beyond their borders, and thus cannot control Internet communications from abroad. “If the king’s writ reaches only as far as the king’s sword, then much of the content of the Internet might be presumed to be free from the regulation of any particular sovereign,” wrote Duke law professor James Boyle, generalizing the point.

Why Geography Matters

A visitor to the dell.com web page finds a message prominently displayed in the upper left-hand corner: “Choose a Country/Region.” The cisco.com page likewise asks users to “Select a Location.” Yahoo’s web page has a “Yahoo International” link that connects to a global map with over twenty-five hyperlinks to specialized web pages tied to particular countries (like Denmark, Korea, and Argentina) and regions (like Asia). Everywhere on the web, sites ask viewers to identify their geographical location. Geographical links are puzzling for those who think of the Net as a borderless medium that renders place irrelevant. But the puzzle disappears when we see that, globalization and the supposed death of distance notwithstanding, national borders reflect real and important differences among peoples in different places. As this chapter shows, geographical borders first emerged on the Internet not as a result of fiats by national governments, but rather organically, from below, because Internet users around the globe demanded different Internet experiences that corresponded to geography. Later chapters will show how governments strengthened borders on the Net by employing powerful “top-down” techniques to control unwanted Internet communications from abroad. But in order to understand fully why the Internet is becoming bordered, we must first understand the many ways that private actors are shaping the Internet to accommodate differences among nations and regions, and why the Internet is a more effective and useful communication tool as a result. The most immediate and important difference reflected by borders is language. People in Brazil, Korea, and France don’t want English language versions of Microsoft products. They want a version they can read and understand. Microsoft learned this lesson when it tried to distribute an English version of Windows operating system in tiny Iceland. Redmond executives thought the market of 500,000 worldwide Icelandic speakers did not justify translation costs and figured the English version would suffice because most Icelanders spoke English as a second language. But Icelanders felt that Microsoft’s plan would imperil their language, which has retained basically the same grammar, spelling, and vocabulary for more than a thousand years.

Global Laws

Alexey Vladimirovich Ivanov, a twenty-something computer geek from Chelyabinsk, Russia, in the Ural Mountains, earned his living hacking the computer networks of American companies. After breaking into a firm’s servers, he would contact it on behalf of “The Expert Group of Protection Against Hackers” and demand thousands of dollars in exchange for tips on how to plug its security holes. One Connecticut company that initially refused to pay received this e-mail from Ivanov:… now imagine please Somebody hack you network (and not notify you about this), he download Atomic software with more then 300 merchants, transfer money, and after this did ‘rm -rf/’ [a Unix command that deletes directories] and after this you company be ruined. I don’t want this, and because this i notify you about possible hack in you network, if you want you can hire me and im allways be check security in you network. What you think about this?... If a firm did not comply with his unsubtle threats, Ivanov would delete its computer files or post its customers’ credit card information on the Web. Not surprisingly, most firms gave in to the extortion. When FBI officials became aware of Ivanov’s scams, they sought help from the Russian police. But as Brendan Koerner explained, “The Russian interior ministry’s ‘Department R,’ which fights cybercrime, can barely keep up with the kontoras in St. Petersburg and Moscow, much less police a distant outpost like Chelyabinsk.” So the FBI took matters into its own hands. Under the guise of a fictional American Internet security firm called “Invita,” the FBI invited Ivanov to the United States to audition for a job identifying flaws in the networks of potential Invita clients. When Ivanov arrived, undercover agents asked him to prove his ability to break into computer networks. Unbeknownst to Ivanov, the FBI was using a “sniffer” keystroke recording program to learn the usernames and passwords for his computers in Russia. After the audition, the FBI arrested Ivanov and, using his usernames and passwords, downloaded incriminating information from his computer in Russia—information later used to convict him.

Conclusion: Globalization Meets Governmental Coercion

Most contemporary assessments of globalization share two ideas. The first is a recognition that we live in an era where technology has made it easier than ever before to move capital, goods, and services across national borders and around the world. The second is a belief that globalization diminishes the relevance of borders, territory, and location, and thereby undermines the territorial nation-state’s role as the central institution for governing human affairs. The Internet has widely been viewed as the essential catalyst of contemporary globalization, and it has been central to debates about what globalization means and where it will lead. “The Internet is going to be like a huge vise that takes the globalization system . . . and keeps tightening and tightening that system around everyone, in ways that will only make the world smaller and smaller and faster and faster with each passing day.” That’s the prediction of globalization’s popularizer and prophet, Thomas Friedman, in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Friedman went farther in his 2005 sequel, The World is Flat, claiming to show how the Internet and related technologies have “made us all next door neighbors,” and are killing geography, distance, and language. Friedman and others are right to emphasize the Internet’s transformative potential. As the Internet becomes more pervasive and as more and more aspects of life become digitalized, it is indeed becoming much easier for human beings everywhere to access, learn from, share, and improve upon the impossibly varied and plentiful information available on the Net. This book, in fact, was written while its peripatetic authors lived in and communicated with one another via the Net from Tokyo, Boston, Geneva, Chicago, Charlottesville, Boca Raton, and Washington, D.C., among other places—something that would have been nearly impossible a mere decade ago. The question we have addressed in this book is not whether the technological changes of the last decade have created changes in the way human beings live or interact. The question is whether those changes have had a lasting effect on how nations, and their peoples, govern themselves. The diminishing costs of moving information on the Internet have obviously made it harder for governments to suppress communications and related activities that they dislike.

Consequences of Borders

Australia’s Joseph Gutnick is a billionaire, a diamond and gold miner, a political player, a philanthropist, and a rabbi. On October 20, 2000, Gutnick awoke in Victoria to find himself accused of tax evasion and money laundering by the American business magazine Barron’s. The article, “UnHoly Gains,” suggested that Gutnick had engaged in shady dealings with Nachum Goldberg, a Melbourne money launderer jailed in 2000 for washing AU$42 million in used notes through a bogus Israeli charity. Gutnick read the story, not in the print version of Barron’s but on the online version of its sister publication, “wsj.com,” a website on a server physically located in New Jersey. Gutnick was not the only Australian to read the story. Approximately seventeen hundred Australians subscribed to wsj.com, including many Australian business and finance leaders. An enraged Gutnick vehemently denied the illicit association with Goldberg. To protect his reputation, he sued Dow Jones & Company—the parent company of both Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal—in an Australian court, taking advantage of tough Australian libel laws unleavened by the U.S. First Amendment. The legal arguments in the Gutnick case mirrored those in the Yahoo litigation in France a few years earlier. Dow Jones argued that Australian courts were legally powerless (or “without jurisdiction”) to rule on the legality of information on a computer in the United States, even if it appeared in Australia. The Australian High Court, like the court in France, disagreed. For material published on the Internet, it stated, the place where the person downloads the material “will be the place where the tort of defamation is committed.” Within two years of this decision, Dow Jones agreed to pay Gutnick AU$180,000 in damages and AU$400,000 in legal fees to settle the case. It also issued this retraction: “Barron’s has no reason to believe Mr. Gutnick was ever a customer of Mr. Goldberg, and has no reason to believe that Mr. Gutnick was a money laundering customer of, or had any criminal or other improper relationship with, Mr. Goldberg.”