To support his case, the general counsel notes that some of America’s most prominent
Internet companies have found trouble trying to follow local law against a backdrop of international criticism. Yahoo! has been faulted for turning over information about a journalist that
allegedly led to his arrest and imprisonment—for no crime that a court in Yahoo!’s home jurisdiction of California could recognize. Cisco has been attacked for selling the routers and
switches that make censorship and surveillance possible. So, too, has Microsoft, for offering
a blog service that generates an error rejecting ‘‘profanity’’ when a user includes the word democracy in the title of a blog. Google has come under fire for offering a search product in
China that omits certain search results compared to what its other offerings provide. Side-byside comparisons of a Google image search for Tiananmen Square in http://google.com and
http://google.cn starkly show the results of censorship; for anyone who can see both sets of
images, the latter lacking any shots of a person staring down a tank in 1989, is forced to consider what it would be like to live under an authoritarian regime. There is no reason why we
should be any different, he concludes.
Successful technology companies must now focus on more than simply implementing great
ideas that people will pay for. In the earliest days of the Internet, the relevant markets were
modest in size and close to home. A local Internet Service Provider once could profit by offering a dialup Internet access service over plain old telephone lines to people who lived near the
corporate headquarters. Few of the big players involved were large, publicly traded entities.
Revenue projections commonly looked like hockey sticks pointing toward bright blue skies.
And, most important for the purposes of this chapter, states left alone the Internet and the
companies that built it and its many services. The prevailing orthodoxy was that a regulator
that required too much of companies doing business on the Internet would unduly restrict
the early growth of online activity, and might find associated high-tech jobs going elsewhere.
Few states placed any kind of liability or responsibility on intermediaries for troubles arising
from the activities and transactions they facilitated.
More than ten years into the Internet revolution, these are no longer the facts on the ground.
The Internet is big business in which entrenched players—and not just what were once called
dot-coms—with colossal market capitalizations compete with one another over multi-billiondollar revenue streams. Their markets span much of the globe. Most important, some states
have increasingly forced companies that provide Internet services to do more to regulate
activity in the Internet space. This approach applies a new kind of pressure on nearly every
corporation whose business involves information and communications technologies (ICTs),
especially when the pressure is piecemeal or downright contradictory from one jurisdiction to
another, and when the desired regulation contravenes the values of the company’s owners or
customers. While liberal democracies have so far remained remarkably hands-off as the Internet has matured, the desire of more closed regimes to tap the Internet’s economic potential
while retaining control of the information space confines the options for these firms.
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Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey
Internet companies have found trouble trying to follow local law against a backdrop of international criticism. Yahoo! has been faulted for turning over information about a journalist that
allegedly led to his arrest and imprisonment—for no crime that a court in Yahoo!’s home jurisdiction of California could recognize. Cisco has been attacked for selling the routers and
switches that make censorship and surveillance possible. So, too, has Microsoft, for offering
a blog service that generates an error rejecting ‘‘profanity’’ when a user includes the word democracy in the title of a blog. Google has come under fire for offering a search product in
China that omits certain search results compared to what its other offerings provide. Side-byside comparisons of a Google image search for Tiananmen Square in http://google.com and
http://google.cn starkly show the results of censorship; for anyone who can see both sets of
images, the latter lacking any shots of a person staring down a tank in 1989, is forced to consider what it would be like to live under an authoritarian regime. There is no reason why we
should be any different, he concludes.
Successful technology companies must now focus on more than simply implementing great
ideas that people will pay for. In the earliest days of the Internet, the relevant markets were
modest in size and close to home. A local Internet Service Provider once could profit by offering a dialup Internet access service over plain old telephone lines to people who lived near the
corporate headquarters. Few of the big players involved were large, publicly traded entities.
Revenue projections commonly looked like hockey sticks pointing toward bright blue skies.
And, most important for the purposes of this chapter, states left alone the Internet and the
companies that built it and its many services. The prevailing orthodoxy was that a regulator
that required too much of companies doing business on the Internet would unduly restrict
the early growth of online activity, and might find associated high-tech jobs going elsewhere.
Few states placed any kind of liability or responsibility on intermediaries for troubles arising
from the activities and transactions they facilitated.
More than ten years into the Internet revolution, these are no longer the facts on the ground.
The Internet is big business in which entrenched players—and not just what were once called
dot-coms—with colossal market capitalizations compete with one another over multi-billiondollar revenue streams. Their markets span much of the globe. Most important, some states
have increasingly forced companies that provide Internet services to do more to regulate
activity in the Internet space. This approach applies a new kind of pressure on nearly every
corporation whose business involves information and communications technologies (ICTs),
especially when the pressure is piecemeal or downright contradictory from one jurisdiction to
another, and when the desired regulation contravenes the values of the company’s owners or
customers. While liberal democracies have so far remained remarkably hands-off as the Internet has matured, the desire of more closed regimes to tap the Internet’s economic potential
while retaining control of the information space confines the options for these firms.
104
Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey