regulating the internet

[Brown, R Ken]

> Jennifer DePalma <jdepalma at 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...