Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu: Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (2006)

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who’s really in control of what’s happening on the Net?

In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet’s challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It’s a book about the fate of one idea–that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google’s struggles with the French government and Yahoo’s capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay’s struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them.

While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance.

Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2006
ISBN 0195152662, 9780195152661
226 pages

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Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, Zittrain (eds.): Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (2010)

Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states. The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous “Great Firewall of China” is one of the first national Internet filtering systems. Today the new tools for Internet controls that are emerging go beyond mere denial of information. These new techniques, which aim to normalize (or even legalize) Internet control, include targeted viruses and the strategically timed deployment of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, surveillance at key points of the Internet’s infrastructure, take-down notices, stringent terms of usage policies, and national information shaping strategies. Access Controlled reports on this new normative terrain.

The book, a project from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the SecDev Group, offers six substantial chapters that analyze Internet control in both Western and Eastern Europe and a section of shorter regional reports and country profiles drawn from material gathered by the ONI around the world through a combination of technical interrogation and field research methods.

Chapter authors: Ronald Deibert, Colin Maclay, John Palfrey, Hal Roberts, Rafal Rohozinski, Nart Villeneuve, Ethan Zuckerman

Editors Ronald Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 0262514354, 9780262514354
656 pages

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Sally Richards: Futurenet: The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet as Told by Its Creators and Visionaries (2002)

An eye-opening look at the next generation of the Internet
As the Internet becomes more mature, its ability to create and support new types of business models with the potential for sustained growth and profitability have captured the interest of a broad group of managers, investors, and entrepreneurs. In FutureNet, author Sally Richards introduces readers to the visionaries and companies shaping the networked world. The experiences and voices of Internet founders Vint Cerf and Len Kleinrock will take readers on a fascinating journey, revealing the power and scope of the next generation of the Internet. Powerhouse firms such as AT&T, Cisco, and MCI provide examples of how influential organizations are facilitating the next generation of the Internet, and creating solid business models that take advantage of this maturing technology. FutureNet will provide readers with an inside account of what lies ahead.

Published by John Wiley and Sons, 2002
ISBN 0471433241, 9780471433248
274 pages

Key terms: ARPANET, ICANN, Bluetooth, Bob Kahn, John Perry Barlow, DMCA, Kim Polese, Dmitry Sklyarov, Internet Archive, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Douglas Engelbart, Jon Postel, Stewart Brand, micropayment, Vinton Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock, Vannevar Bush, Bob Young, ElcomSoft, Vint Cerf

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