WHO CONTROLS THE INTERNET? ILLUSIONS OF A BORDERLESS WORLD – JACK GOLDSMITH & TIM WU

Abstract

The invention of any new communication technology brings with it a feeling of euphoria and hope. The hope that somehow our living conditions are going to change fundamentally. At the invention of the telegraph, we felt that language differences would be obliterated in favour of a common language and physical boundaries would jettisoned firmly into the past.1 Unfailingly, new communication technologies inspire in us the feeling that a somewhat new liberty will result even though we know that technologies do not change human nature. They are tools. Tools perform tasks they are made for but at no time do they change the nature of the user. Tools may inspire new ways of thinking, adjustments even, but they do not change the human being. We cannot imbue tools with the ability to change us for we are the ones responsible for our own mistakes and the way we arrange the world. Therefore, new technologies, if anything, end up preserving the existing social orders and disorders in the new system. Goldsmith and Wu capture this idea with succinctly. ‘It was an era in which the Internet was changing the rules of business…It seemed only natural that the Internet would also change the rules of politics.’2 Decades later, the arbitrary conditions of our existence as they were are as real as they were before the Internet became a commonplace medium. Nevertheless, our utopian ideals did not hold but the governments we thought would die have remained firm. However, governments are still held in the stupor, ‘How do we control the Internet?’