Jennifer DePalma <jdepalma@cato.org> wrote:
Anyone have any opinions on the feasibility of regulating the internet?
Of course you can regulate the Internet, the Internet is *made* of regulation. All it is is an agreement between people who run computers to send and receive messages, and pass them on to other computers, according to certain rules. It is like the treaties between supposedly sovereign nation states - you play by the rules if you want people to talk to you. The Internet is the best living example that you don't need governments to have regulation (although the US government certainly helped a lot. Maybe the Net or the Moon landings will go down in history as your pyramids or Stonehenge, the one thing your civilisation will be remembered for). The regulations will be made and broken and kept and changed by the people who use the Net and no-one will ever know what they all are at any one time but a lot of us will have a good idea of most of them, most of the time. The Internet doesn't depend on telephone companies or governments or undersea cables or satellites or university computing departments or cable TV or copper wires or carrier pigeons (that reminds me - time for my annual check up on the new RFCs :-) or fibre optics or anything else, although it uses all those things. It is software, not hardware, it is a set of rules, treaties, agreements, protocols, words, comments, jargon, ideas, thoughts. The Internet is like money, or marriage, or table manners - while people act as if they believe in it, then it will continue to exist. Of course if what the question was really about the feasibility of regulating what people use the Internet *for* - well, that's a different question...