Michael Kaiser's weblog

Flag follows trade – the concept that the state will extend its reach into any environment in which commerce is taking place. The debate about net neutrality has direct relevance to this idea and some interesting implications for the future of cyberspace. Will the arms of national power pursue American corporations as they extend their reach, through cyberspace, into other counties? What forms of national power will they (or can they) use?

In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry forcefully opened Japan to American, and eventually international, trade. He did so using United State naval power, literally threatening to bombard Japanese cities if President Fillmore’s desire to open Japanese ports was not met. Nowadays, when there is a trade dispute between states, international fora like the WTO are used to resolve trade disputes when it comes to tangible items like automobiles or bananas and even, in some cases, intellectual property and copyrights. But the WTO’s relevance to the “wild west” of cyberspace is still very unclear.

The example from class last week of Yahoo and eBay halting all sales of Nazi paraphernalia at the request of the French and German governments is a decent, but incomplete, example of what I am trying to get at. In this case, the US government did not get involved in defending the “rights” of Yahoo and eBay to conduct trade because of the nature of the product and the extremely small market under dispute. But say for example that an ideologically motivated country banned all US online retailers because they facilitated access to “immoral” material? Or, perhaps more insidiously, what if the “ban” were in practice really a discriminatory scheme designed to favor indigenous or other “approved” websites over American ones? How would the Depts. of Commerce and State respond?

I would certainly like to learn more about the foreign policy (and I am using that to refer to both State and Commerce) mechanisms available to combat such a scheme. But, perhaps more relevant to my paper topic (a national strategy for Cyberspace), I would like to know more about the ability of the US to combat this kind of behavior without resorting to international bodies. Is it possible to use coercive national power to force the issue?

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I was connected to this article from Arts and Letters Daily. It has some relevance to our gatekeeping topic for this week, related to social networking sites and societal norms. The article is “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” by Christine Rosen.

Below is an excerpt:

Also, in the offline world, communities typically are responsible for enforcing norms of privacy and general etiquette. In the online world, which is unfettered by the boundaries of real-world communities, new etiquette challenges abound. For example, what do you do with a “friend” who posts inappropriate comments on your Wall? What recourse do you have if someone posts an embarrassing picture of you on his MySpace page? What happens when a friend breaks up with someone—do you defriend the ex? If someone “friends” you and you don’t accept the overture, how serious a rejection is it? Some of these scenarios can be resolved with split-second snap judgments; others can provoke days of agonizing.

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There were two interesting articles I pulled off of my Google reader so far this week that are relevant to our class dicussion last week.

“BBC Tech: Net Gains for Tiny Pacific Nation” An atoll in the South Pacific has come up with a novel way of making money via its domain name .TK.

and, today from the NY Times

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

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The disucssion in class this week focused on different philosophies of the role of government in cyberspace. The readings provided a few different perspectives on this role, but did not address the internet as strategic space. In Johnson and Post’s “Law and Borders” article , there is discussion of the Lex Mercatorium that I found particularly rsonant. The comparison talked about the role of law in commercial interactions, but not that of security. This is an area that I would like to learn more about.

Johnson and Post discuss the Merchant Law as an analogy for the rise of “Cyberspace law”:

Merchants could not resolve their disputes by taking them to the local noble, whose established feudal law mainly concerned land claims. Nor could the local lord easily establish meaningful rules for a sphere of activity he barely understood, executed in locations beyond his control. The result of this jurisdictional confusion, arising from a then-novel form of boundary-crossing communications, was the development of a new legal system—Lex Mercatoria.\74\ The people who cared most about and best understood their new creation formed and championed this new law, which did not destroy or replace existing law regarding more territorially-based transactions (e.g. transferring land ownership). Arguably, exactly the same type of phenomenon is developing in Cyberspace right now.\75\

Taking the example of that era a little bit further, I thought about the transition from the medieval system of international commerce to that of the early modern period. The rise of Mercantilism in the 16th century might have lessons for the development of cyberspace as a security environment.

The merchants moved in, developed themselves and became profitable. As their realm of interests expanded and the stakes in their interactions became higher, they looked to the state for protection, if they could not provide it themselves. At the same time, states, seeing this commercial power as vital to their own fiscal regime, put their hand in the cookie jar and facilitated security.

Although from a later era, the East India Company also provides a good example. The Company developed colonies around the world until it started becoming more “state-like” in its security administration, finally being taken over by the British Crown in 1858 after the Indian mutiny the year prior. In a similar vein, will the US government have to intercede in cyberspace because large internet companies are having difficulty providing for their own security in cyberspace? Or, perhaps more likely, will companies like Google and Yahoo become so proficient in promoting their own interests that they threaten the ability of the US government to be the primary “security guarantor” in cyberspace? If so, what will the state response be?

In reading for my other class this semester, I am starting to see some analogies between cyberspace and outer space in terms of how the US government views them as security environments. For each, there is a definite contradiction between defining both environments as international “commons” while at the same time viewing each as vital to national security, broadly defined. That will be the topic for next week’s discussion.

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