Remember the "borderless" Internet? It's officially dead

By Nate Anderson
Ars Technica
Nov. 11, 2011

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there," wrote L.P. Hartley in his terrific novel The Go-Between. But Hartley knew nothing of the Internet when he wrote his novel of adolescent sexual awakening; if he had, he might have been shocked at just how quickly the past became a foreign place. Indeed, from the perspective of the recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would set up US website blacklisting, require search engine censorship, and divide the Internet into "domestic" and "foreign" sites, the sorts of Internet arguments being made in the late 1990s don't sound like something from a foreign country so much as something from a foreign planet.

An important strain of thought in the mid-1990s was "cyberlibertarianism," a view that saw the Internet as something truly novel in world history. This exceptionalist position led to arguments that governments should leave the 'Net alone; existing law stopped at the modem jack, and beyond was a new realm called cyberspace that would solve its own problems.

"You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve," wrote rancher, EFF co-founder, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow in a 1996 manifesto to governments. "You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means." The conflicts would be worked out based on the Golden rule—the only one recognized by "all our constituent cultures." The Internet was its own place, and needed its own government.

As for all the horrific stuff that humans get up to in every place they have so far lived, Barlow downplayed it. "All the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits,” Barlow wrote. It simply wasn’t possible to “separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.”

Incredible sentiments when considered 15 years later—but perhaps understandable when coming from someone like Barlow. What was more surprising was that the most famous Internet case of the era went even further.

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