How does current law address issues like pollution, which ignore national boundaries?
Current law doesn’t always address the pollution problem very well. Some pollution is regulated unilaterally through nations following their own interests; this is closely analogous to what happens on the Net. And of course there are global treaties on pollution, a few of which have been successful. But treaties on pollution have been easier to make than treaties governing, say, Internet speech, because disagreements about speech are much more intractable than disagreements about pollution. Just this month researchers at Cambridge University claimed to have defeated the “Great Firewall of China,” the Chinese system for censoring Internet content. Given the global nature of the Internet, won’t attempts at local control ultimately prove futile? I am skeptical of this claim, and if anything China is proving the opposite point. The Cambridge program depends on receiving e-mails from users in China. If individual users in China can find the offshore anti-censorship sites and software, so ca
