491S Blog Post W/E 2/17/07

The article Law and Borders discusses one of the issues that I wrote about last week in my blog and that the protection of autonomy of entities. In the case of myspace and facebook, the schools were overstepping their bounds in curtailing the kids autonomy. The article talks about the inability of giving the internet a boundary because it lacks a legitimate spatial representation. I find it intriguing that the author mentions that actual spatial and geographic boundaries keepe people separated whereas on the internet this isn't the case. Furthermore, as it would be simple to force websites to adhere to the laws of the land the owner is in, this becomes tricky. If a site is hosting something that is illegal in the place where the site-owner resides, but it is only patroned by people from a place where the content is legal, though it would be seemingly ok to still keep it under the jurisdiction of the geographic location, the ethics of the situation is questioned. Also, what if the main administrator and the owner are not the same person and thus they could be only linked by the internet, who then committed the crime?

I am also extremely intrigued by the idea that customs agents have "generally given up" on policing information "transferred by modem". Even though the sheer impossibility of the task at hand would seem to make any attempts at it failures, it is interesting that the government has more or less washed its hands of the whole matter. Obviously, this is an unwise decision because of both the numerous laws that could be broken by those using the internet and because of the myriad disputes that arise.

The author mentions how legally, a name, in this case a domain name, is a basic building block into creating idenity, however, this idea is both challenged and aided by certain aspects of the internet. It is inarguable that there is certain presence with specific domain names and even certain people on the internet, in some instances there is capital changing hands, however, considering the rapidness which the owner of something such as this can change and the inability of any person on the internet being 100-% sure of the identity of any entity or person they are dealing with, this idea of property becomes malleable.