It has
also brought it into the remit of existing national laws.
Moreover, governments throughout the world have become more
assertive in exercising territorial jurisdiction over the
hitherto ostensibly extraterritorial Net. A French court has
prohibited Yahoo! from making certain content on its Web sites
available to French citizens. An American court advised Yahoo!
to ignore this decision. A Russian programmer was arrested by
the FBI for offering a decryption software for sale in Russia
(where it is perfectly legal). Governments from China to Saudi
Arabia filter Web content regularly. Following the September
11 attacks, restrictive anti-terrorist legislation the world
over targeted cyberspace.
But the real territorialization of the Internet - the
redrawing of its internal contours and the withdrawal of its
libertarian foundations - is more pernicious, all-pervasive,
quotidian, and surreptitiously gradual. This is not the
outcome of legal revolutions and court-driven evolution. It is
piecemeal, quiet, unnoticed, often inadvertent and unintended.
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