Is The US Controlling The Legal Direction Of The Internet?

Legal Issues

from the going-that-way dept

There have been plenty of articles about the question of “jurisdiction in cyberspace”. Since anything online can appear in any country, the question is always which country’s laws apply? While some suggest that it’s a simple matter of making it be the country where the server resides, that’s not what’s happening in practice. It appears that, increasingly, the laws of the US are the laws of the internet, even though that upsets plenty of people in other countries. The article mentions that ISPs in countries outside the US regularly receive DMCA “takedown” requests, even though they’re not subject to that law. Many are still afraid that US courts will then require that the sites get shut down – even if they don’t violate any laws in the country of origin. The writer of the article suggests that countries need to either accept the US’s dominance in online law making, adopting a “national walled garden” approach like Saudi Arabia or China, or choose the most difficult option and try to create systems that respect national differences in the law, while coming up with a method for “global consensus” in areas where the laws disagree.