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Geography, Laws, and the Internet
Sara Chan writes: "This week's edition of The Economist has the cover story and lead editorial devoted to how geography affects the Internet after all. The whole of China is basically firewalled. In France, Yahoo! is appealing the court ruling that banned its selling Nazi memorabilia. In Iran, ISPs are required to block immoral sites. Each country wants to impose its own laws on others, of course without reciprocation. The editorial concludes thus: "The likely outcome is that, like shipping and aviation, the Internet will be subject to a patchwork of overlapping regulations, with local laws that respect local sensibilities, supplemented by higher-level rules governing cross-border transactions and international standards." Not all new, but worth pondering."
If you want to offer services worldwide, you should compy with standards worldwide.
That is completely impractical. There are millions of legal entities world wide(countries, states, counties, cities), is it beyond the capability of any business to keep track of them all. If a legal entity doesn't want content, I think it should be up to them to keep it out like China does. Not to require some foregin business to notice that somebody is french.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
What I mean is.. there's no need to panic because some things are not they way they should just now. Criticism on the internet often referes to bad/unsuitable things published to the masses.
As an example, today in a large swedish online newspaper, a reporter found a huge "scoop". He found out that one of the Universities of sweden was providing computer resources to swedish nazists. After a bit of research, it came out that the university was running an Irc-server (dalnet) where the nazis held "online-meetings".
Noone would consider it a scoop that a bunch of criminals phoned each other over the telephone network, or that they sent snailmail.
The Internet will get integrated into our everyday routines, and its use will get balanced to what it's good for.
And where's the problem with china being firewalled, isn't that all up to them ? I bet there are firewalls protecting western world internet resources against china as well...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
In the US, the corporations are trying to impose regulations to get maximum profit, while the government (for now) has mostly stayed out of it because of respect for free speech. Outside the US, where speech is not so free, governments will try to regulate in accordance with their countries beliefs. I hardly think this can be compared to shipping and aviation.
Regarding the cover story, the hinderences caused by distance will (like everything in the computer field) be overcome by technology. Data traveling from PC to server and back at the speed of light can have very little difference in travel time when the computers are next to each other compared to opposite sides of the planet. Of course we're far from this (optics direct to the computer, instant switching, etc.), but we'll get there, just like everything else. We'll look back and laugh at cover stories like this in the decades to come.
Developers: We can use your help.
We all have our problems. But in this case, its easy - you don't want your citizens to see something? Its up to you to restrict them and deal with teh consequences like being voted out of office (if your citizens have that right.
Yes in an ideal world everything would be free and all would be free to see it - but that just isn't gonna happen. Sure, we can bitch about China firewalling and filtering everything - but that's life in a communist country.
Yes, I'm American so I can take this stance since my net use is pretty much wide open unless the FBI has a bad day, but beyond that, as long as some other country doesn't try to stick their noses into an American companies business (yeah right) I'm happy :)
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I think the biggest thing we're all waiting for is for someone to break a law in another country, and find themselves arrested and extradited.
The Skylarov case comes to mind, obviously, but it's slightly different. Mr. Skylarov was accused of breaking US law, and then when he voluntarily entered the US, he was arrested.
What scares me, and should scare the rest of you, is the possibility of a foreign nation demanding extradition of someone for breaking that nation's laws without ever entering the country physically.
It is a simple matter to break Singaporean or Chinese law - simply denounce the government. Many other countries have similar laws, and if I should put up a website denouncing the Chinese government, that website would be in violation of the law in China. But I'm not in China, I'm not a Chinese citizen, the website wouldn't be in China.
That may not matter. China can demand my extradition to China to stand trial. Certainly, today the US wouldn't comply with that demand. But how long until keeping China happy is more important than a single US citizen? China produces a LOT that's exported to the US, and enjoys most favored nation trade status currently. This gives them a certain amount of clout with the US government (admittedly, not enough to extort $1million for an airplane sitting on a runway for 6 weeks or so).
If you think this can't happen, look to the state of California extending its jurisdiction to anyone in the world (the DeCSS case). I'm afraid this is only the beginning.
Thanks for taking a moment to listen to my ramblings and consider.
We have servers in Beijing that send e-mail to US employees. The user account they send from is <watchdog@DOMAIN> because they're doing system monitoring (they're the WATCHDOGs, get it?)
Anyhow, ANY mail they send to the US bounces. But here's the cool part, it bounces back to the sender (watchdog) but when that (as an alias) gets forwarded to the US again, it goes through, probably because of the null-sender envelope on the bounce.
We know that its some active proxying mechanism that's intercepting the messages because the bounce message is something that the MX's in the US can't possibly generate (e.g., we have the source code for the MTA and the string that the "remote side allegedly sent" to cause the bounce doesn't exist).
So, yes, despite your anecdotal "evidence" of there not being any firewalling mechanism, there most assuredly is one, and it plays havoc with my mail on a daily basis.
We (just meeting the USians here) should be setting an example for freedom, not censorship and control.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
>
> This part of the article will be a non issue once satallite internet takes off in a few years.
Owned and operated, pray tell, from citizens of where?
I live in Texas, and operate a website hosted in Florida. Easy enough, two jurisdictions to worry about, both in the same country. But my cable modem service provider is Time Warner; I have no idea where my insidious signals get bounced on their way to Florida.
And, of course, there's the people who visit the site. I get hits from every continent, and it's been shown that it's not possible to accurately block an entire large geographic block. If some country out there decides to be as arrogant as the US, I'll be obliged to obey the laws of some country I didn't even intend to contact.
The Economist's story is good, but the conclusion should be restated for brevity: we're hosed.