The Friendly Guide to Regulating the Internet: National Sovereignty
The final section of The Friendly Guide to Regulating the Internet has been added:
It's very difficult to say whether interfering with the sovereignty of other nations is good or bad, as it depends a lot on the situation at hand and your own view of the situation. One thing is certain however, some regulations of this global network of ours involve international diplomacy, which can make the creation or implementation of laws way, way, way more difficult.
Read the introduction to online national sovereignty at FriendlyToS.
2015-12-29 Update
FriendlyToS is no longer on the Internet. The content of the originally referenced post has been reproduced below.
Understanding why Internet regulations are the way that they are is confusing. So, FriendlyToS is creating The Friendly Guide to Regulating the Internet, a set of brief introductions to the most important concepts in Internet regulations. Today we add the final section to this guide - a discussion of how tricky national sovereignty can be online.
National Sovereignty
Have you ever heard of the Internet? This global network of ideas that lets me hear music from Africa and watch shows from South Korea while sitting in the United States? I can access content from all over the world. That's pretty damn awesome, right?
Well, there is at least one issue this global network brings up: maintaining national sovereignty, i.e. the right of a nation to decide its own rules and laws. When a nation, especially a large nation, decides on its form of Internet regulation, it is bound to impact the lives of people and businesses around the world. For example, the European Union's Privacy Directive, which is designed to protect the privacy of European citizens, places restrictions on businesses outside of the EU if they want to offer their services in the EU. While some companies can juggle differences in regulations across nations, some companies can't. So the privacy regulations of the EU can end up impacting the lives of American users of a website, because that website has to meet the EU's regulations.
It's very difficult to say whether interfering with the sovereignty of other nations is good or bad, as it depends a lot on the situation at hand and your own view of the situation. One thing is certain however, some regulations of this global network of ours involve international diplomacy, which can make the creation or implementation of laws way, way, way more difficult.
