The implementation of traditional legal systems and public policies mostly presuppose geographically demarcated units (Johnson and Post, 1996; Selin, 1996). However, transnationalization of telecommunication networks and shifts to electronically global marketplaces pose a challenge to current territorially-based political units and legal regimes. In an era where networked computing and communications increasingly undermine the power of geographically-based political units demarcated by physical borders, societies feel the urge to conjure up alternative systems. In this paper, we examine the implications of the new "borderless" order that the Internet brings forth for building new social and legal frameworks. We discuss what issues we face in developing a multi-jurisdictional system that has the mission of coordinating between a multitude of sociolegal sensitivities and globalized economic systems that do not necessarily fall into different sides of physical boundaries. Throughout the discussion we attempt to map the implications of technological innovations to emergent policy questions.
More particularly we deal with the following issues:
Flow of cultural norms and moral codes
- Flow of norms and moral codes:
- Through what processes can political units accomodate local cultural and moral sensitivities while at the same time integrating "outsider" perspectives that might carry contradictory options to the indigenous ones?
- Laying out the issue...
- Is there a solution in political firewalls?
- Non-geographical regulatory complexes
Layered regulation: self-regulationGlobalized public places:
- Flow of goods, services and capital:
- How is technological innovation determining the frameworks for secure and fruitful exchange of goods, services and capital for all the parties involved in globally networked marketplaces?
- Laying out the issue...
- The backbone of information processing
- Information processing and the production process
- Relevancy of government
How should regulatory political units deal with the practices of virtual communities which gets established along the lines of common interest and expertise rather than within circumscribed geographical locations?
Laying out the issue...
What is virtual community?
Virtual scientific community: possibilities and policy problems
There is little doubt that rapid advances in the convergence of communications and computer technology is causing a disruption of in the ways that territorially based social systems assert their power. The availability of near-instantaneous telecommunications and fast distributed networks means that it is possible to view the world as an integrated global cultural system— what Harvey (1989) calls “time-space compression.” In addition to incorporating flows of money, capital, goods, and people, the state-of-the-art technologies lead to a proliferation of encounters with new and “foreign” cultural forms. On the surface, the emergence of global nature of networks leads to singular, unified places where geographical boundaries become blurred if not cease to exist. However, somewhat ironically, the same process highlights the heterogeneity of normative and cultural structures that interplay with one another. In this new system, political units bear the burden of situating the non-local with respect to the local without causing severe erosions in their preexisting spheres of influence. Through what processes can political units accomodate local cultural and moral sensitivities while at the same time trying to integrate “outsider” perspectives that might carry contradictory options to the indigenous ones? Is there a need for new regulatory regimes or political organs that would be overlaid on the current geographically-based sovereignties?
With the advent of networked societies and distributed communication mediums, cultural expression end up, at least on the surface, being abstracted from history and geography (Castells, 1996). The availability and efficiency of networking and communicative contact between participants of geographically separated political units makes the distinction between the “other” or “foreign” and “familiar” cultural forms notoriously difficult to be drawn. So what would the most immediate “instincts” of nation states be in handling this issue?Non-geographical regulatory complexesDespite a confusion that is confronting territorially-based nation states in controlling their spheres of influence with regard to cultural and moral issues, one possible way of handling the situation is through stretching preexisting territorially-based frameworks to leave undesired content out of the reach of one’s citizens. One possible way of regulating access could be through removing the hardware that allows Internet Protocol packets to enter a particular territory. Of course, such a drastic measure, if taken by a state would have unwanted side effects, such as cutting all the beneficial links to the Internet, for example those required for electronic commerce and “benign” cultural exchanges. A somewhat less drastic measure would be to create governmentally supervised sub-networks that have limited contact with the public Internet. By controlling the gateway between the sub-network and other larger networks, a state can impose control on the content of the Internet that falls within its territory.
Imposing territory over supposedly borderless networks is not a far-fetched solution. There recently have been several attempts by individual governments to set up territorial “intranets” to protect their respective citizens from undesirable content on the public networks. One example is China, who has built two government-operated internal networks connected to the rest of the Internet through a limited number of regulated servers (Wu, 1997). Another example comes from the government of Singapore: in 1996, SBA (“Singapore Broadcasting Authority") set up proxy servers in order to restrict access to those parts of the Internet that were deemed to contain unlawful and objectionable material (Ang and Nadajaran, 1996). However, this measure led to several problems because these proxy servers could not handle the amount of traffic, prompting the government of Singapore to start allowing some businesses to circumvent the proxy serves.
In addition to bringing about such performance problems, removal of content by a government from servers in one’s own jurisdiction does not prevent placing of the same content on the Internet through service providers in other countries. One famous case that led to such smuggling of undesirable content to outside of the borders is France’s blocking of a web page containing a banned book disclosing “secrets” regarding the country’s ex-president. The book, Le Grand Secret, was immediately banned upon its publication because its author, Dr. Claude Gubler, violated French medical and secrecy laws by asserting that his patient, former French President Francois Mitterand, hid his diagnosis of cancer from the French public throughout his presidency (Green-Armytage, 1996). But the ban did not prevent the same content being placed on the Internet through service providers in other European countries.
The above and many more examples of single-governmental attempts of controlling contents on global networks demonstrate that containment policies have largely been misguided and unfruitful. Staiman (1997) describes attempts to shield users from undesired content as a two-step process: (1) determining that a certain Internet address contains such content, and (2) preventing access to such content. With so much content on the Internet to handle, it is trivial to point out that both of these steps could potentially lead to many false positives (sites of content that would have been acceptable/permissible if more powerful algorithms had been used) and false negatives (sites that would have been unacceptable/impermissible if more powerful algorithms had been used).
To summarize, similar techniques to firewall technologies that are commonly employed by corporations to prevent inside users from accessing outside sites, or vice versa, can potentially be adopted by nation states. The packet filtration routers that are employed at these firewalls are conceptually similar to checkpoints that countries set up at border crossings to enforce laws in regard to immigration, emigration, and customs. In being so, firewall technologies are, by and large, regulatory systems based on a presumption of geographical boundaries.
If we accept the premise that single-handed approaches adopted by national states would bump against difficulties, is it feasible to conjure up new international political units overlaid on the existing geographical structure? It seems feasible to set up broad and interconnected regimes of legal, regulatory, and social orderings that achieve centralization of control by coordinating between existing sovereigns. One way of doing that is by creating new international governing bodies along the lines of WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and WTO (World Trade Organization) for dealing with content related issues. Such supranational regulatory regimes would try to fulfill the need for globally erected and enforced policies that are sensitive to local variations. For example, a transnational system could be set for on-line certification of organizations that can be used to filter content that would be almost-universally offensive such as child pornography. Of course, such an approach assumes that participating entities (e.g., nation states) could possibly negotiate into a consensus about what kinds of subject matters are objectionable and what not.The problems with pursuing international regulatory bodies in addition to inherent difficulties in reaching a consensus are obvious: issues of scope, cultural differences, varying standards telecommunications and computer networks, and being able to enforce a long-lasting agreement.
The logical structure of the Internet is very similar to the layered logic of object-oriented programming in that it contains successive levels of abstraction. New non-territorial regulatory systems can exploit this layered architecture as a guide to their policy making. The lowest layer is geared towards infrastructure issues, such as the networks and connections that make functionalities such as e-mail and electronic commerce physically possible. There is a bunch of middle layer functions such as standard e-mail and data encryption protocols. Only at the highest level of abstraction, cultural and moral norms regarding message content become relevant. In most cases, states would probably agree about the low-level standards about functional issues, but would want to impose their own will about high-level norms that are about politically sensitive issues. Thus, to regulate this layer, states could count on the regulation that local network service providers offer at a commercial level. Of course, there is a downside to this proposal. Many governments would be unwilling to give up control to private hands. But Castells (1996) points out, for networked societies, “the power of flow takes precedence over the flows of power” (p. 469). Since networks are multiple and the content is fluid, a centralized government control is hard to achieve and mostly undesirable. As Johnson and Post (1996) states, “experience suggests that the community of online users and service providers is up to the task of developing a self-governance system.”One problem with self-regulatory approaches is that the degree to which the cyberspace will be left alone will be different for every state, because states are heterogeneous and act according to individualized preferences. That is, in some countries cyberspace may be left to govern itself, while in others the government will want to regulate heavily. The observed practice at present reflect such inconsistency-- the degree of regulation varies immensely among nation states.
Flow of Goods, Services and Capital
The current legal frameworks and treaties regulating transnational trade makes strong presumptions about geographic boundaries between nations. As Selin (1996) suggests, "there are few international rights, because international treaties typically establish coordinated, national standards instead of a single, unique global right." The convergence of communications and computer technology has shifted the value placed on information and the import knowledge-based systems have had on the production process. As a result, an informational mode of development is evolving and may lead to the alteration or displacement of traditional role of government in commercial and financial markets.The backbone of information processing
Communications services have been transformed by a long series of innovations such as copper wire, coaxial cable, fiber optics, and microwave transmission. These innovations have resulted in steadily increasing bandwidth and decreasing unit cost. Increased processing power in computer technology has been exploited to achieve speed and make computers easier to use. Arguably the most important means of exploiting processing power is to increase generality and flexibility in the production process.Relevancy of governmentInformational development engenders a new set of conditions which belie such familiar social constructs as territorial-based laws, financial systems and political systems. Perhaps the most significant technological contribution to this trend is the separation of services and infrastructure, particularly with respect to telecommunications. Modularization of telephony technology and defining explicit interfaces to the infrastructure enable service providers to offer a wider range of services and applications over a common infrastructure. The earliest example of this trend is the selling of trunk circuits such as T1 and DS3 as a separate component to carry voice or data. Splitting out the lower-level infrastructure facility by revealing the interfaces to the point-point circuits is the single critical change that has created the long-haul data network revolution. These trunks have permitted construction of the Internet and switched packet networks (Branscomb, 1996). Generalized networking infrastructure offer more potential for supporting layered applications and services. Overlaid services such as IP-based telephony and multicasting, together with support for real-time services, are just a few examples of how services can potentially cross regulatory borders. For instance, the FCC telecommunications act of 1996 does not regulate telephony or broadcast over the Internet. The question that arises is whether the emergence of these competitive IP-based services will cause a market failure in the capital intensive industries such as the telecommunications industry and if so, should these technologies be regulated?
Information processing and the production process
"In the new informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing and symbol communication. Information processing is focused on improving the technology of information processing as a source of productivity, in a virtuous circle of interaction between knowledge sources of technology and the application of technology to improve knowledge generation and information processing" (Castells, 1997).
If we accept the Castellian form of informational development then we see at the basis of trans-national trade practices a shift from networks of interconnected factors of production to networks of fully integrated global delivery systems. In the informational economy there is a dependency between knowledge and total output. The production process itself has become a series of links between the different facilities in the production process and in many service businesses the production process is the product itself. The concern for real-time delivery of goods and services has diminished the emphasis of scale economies and elevated the importance of standard technologies, flexible systems and scaleable capacity which allow "manufactures to arrange small independent cells with a modest capital investment requirements." (Greider, 1997) The ability of business to move quickly into and out of markets as individual economic agents creates a global network of interaction that transcend scope of geographic-based legal and regulatory regimes.
Market forces in both an industrial and an informational economy are driven by competitive price pressures, political transactions and enabling technologies. However in the informational economy the Nation State struggles with maintaining relevancy. State and Federal control is increasingly bypassed by global flows of capital goods, services, production, communication and information.(Castell, 1996). Global standards may in fact be necessary to prevent market failure conditions in the global economy. The traditional capital calls to government to manage market disruptions and debt liquidations may be replaced by self-regulating and self-winding technology-based systems. For instance, concerns for security as a strategic decision to protect intellectual property and prevent market failure problems in content markets leads to consideration of a common framework for protection. Investment in a spanning layer of generalized network security services that leave application-level decisions such as access control and type of security system left to policy makers in both the private and public sector is a viable role for government in the informational economy.
The global financial complex is on the verge of revolutionary change. Global arbitrage cause currencies to become more and more distant from real and local economies. Global flows of capital cause trade imbalances and fluctuating foreign currency reserves making it increasingly difficult to manage and measure the wealth of nations using the traditional tools of monetary and fiscal policy. The increasing difficulty of government control of the economy is accentuated by the transnationalization of production trade networks (Castells, 1997) The technology of money lending and packaging has outpaced banking regulations. However, if deregulation is not harmonized throughout the financial centers of the world then the global playing field will not be level. Today, the German and Japanese banks are subject to far fewer regulations (Mander and Goldsmith, 1997). Highly developed countries have been able to not only gain access but full control of the financial marketplaces of less developed economies through trade accords such as NAFTA and GATT. The deregulation mandates put forth in those accords have enabled foreign banks, primarily US-based banks to control foreign financial markets of less developed economies. If one views the global economy as a single accounting unit then it is conceivable that supranational policy initiatives could be embedded into global investment, taxation and production functions regulate the global financial marketplace.
The widespread adoption of electronic spaces and virtual environments within which people can interact with others is another factor which might constitute a challenge to a geographically carved out world. Urban planners have traditionally been preoccupied with building physical spaces of cities and other geographical units. Geography-based policy making regarding public places have been concerned with documenting the spatial and temporal rhythms of citizens as they move through their daily lives and social interactions in physical space. For example, it was assumed that people go to place of work, return home each day, and do shopping and recreation over the weekend. Nowadays, in networked societies, people can transcend these spatially and temporally limited activities and participate in electronic spaces to do teleworking, teleshopping, telebanking, etc. It is hard to speculate on the ways in which this new mode of communication or community formation would affect policy makers' decisions about building "public spaces" for residents. One issue that seems to be important to consider is how to make electronic communities evenly accessible to people from different kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds. The main factor excluding people from advanced technologies such as telematics-- cable networks, video conferencing, e-mail-- is, not surprisingly, cost. So, it seems that the main mission of political units in regulating electronic environments should be laying out the infrastructure of virtual communities in a way that would make them increasingly accessible.What is virtual community?
What is a "community"? Traditionally, we have defined a community as a group of folks who live close together geographically. With the development of computer-mediated communication technologies, geography and time are no longer boundaries. Social connections which never before were possible, or relatively hard to achieve, are now facilitated by the public network.Computer-mediated communication technologies create ties to bind people into a new type of community which is based on common interests or expertise instead of geography. That is what we call "virtual community."
Comprised of different systems such as electronic mail, bulletin board systems, and real-time chat services, computer-mediated communication is both an interpersonal, one-to-one medium of communication and a one-to-many or even many-to many form of mass communication. It has the potential to affect the nature of social life in terms of both the interpersonal relationships and the character of community. Virtual community encompasses the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions of community; social interaction and solidarity are evident within bulletin board conferences and real-time chat modes as friendships and romances blossom; economic and political activity expands within cyberspace as international business transactions are made and political advice is exchanged between countries; and culturally, people are exposed to the value and symbol systems of other nations.
Scime (1994) suggests that true internet virtual community have in common shared interests, shared values, caring and nurturing, discourse and a moral voice.
With the help of communication technologies, a scientific researcher can communicate with other researches in his field from all over the world very easily. They can exchange ideas by E-mail, participate in discussion in BBS or News groups, hold meetings by video conference, etc. Here we see a trend of globalization of scientific research. Can we imagine, that with the development of network technologies, the researchers all over the world form a virtual community. We can call it virtual scientific community. In this community, there are many sub-communities made up of the researchers in a specific field. It is a hierarchical structure.The virtual scientific community will greatly foster the development of science and technology. It allows the researchers to share their knowledge and ideas. Repetitive research work is avoided. Thus it eliminates the waste of time, money and man power. It allows the researchers from all over the world to cooperate in one research project. It means more ideas, more experimental places, more potential markets for the research results.
The virtual scientific community also arises many problems. The first problem is copyright law. The global nature of Internet adds more complexity in the copyright issue. There will be more and more cooperation in scientific research. The owner of one technology or product may reside in different countries. The owners are geographically dispersed. The technology or product may be used in many different countries. Apparently our current geography-based copyright law can not deal with these situations. To solve the problem, we need a law or treaty internationally acknowledged. The governments should cooperate to foster the formation of such a law or treaty.
Another problem in the virtual scientific community is the conflict between the development of science and geographical benefits.There is one saying that science has no national boundaries. This is only right to some extent. In fact, some governments would like to keep some research work secret or limit the distribution of some technologies to protect the benefits of their nations. Such constraints work against the globalization of scientific research. Currently, this issue stands an an area that needs negotiation and cooperation between governments.As a policy suggestion, it seems political units are better off with an hands-off approach in terms of regulating virtual communities. Micro-networks are commonly observed to develop their own distinct rule sets and methods of penalizing divergences from norms. Any geoography-oriented policy is bound to fail as far as virtual communities are concerned given that thousands and thousands of such networks cross many geographical boundaries in bringing people together on common themes, interests, and viewpoints. So, for on-line interactions that minimally impact the vital interests of sovereigns, the self-regulatory structures of networked communities seem better suited to deal with their own issues than governmental authorities (Johnson and Post, 1996).
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