Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.

• Author: Reynolds, Glenn Harlan
• Position: Book review

Sometimes the cliches are true. Like this one: "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun." As I read Who Controls the Internet?, (1) that old Maoist catchphrase kept resonating, because the short answer to the title's question is, "The guys with guns." This must come as something of a disappointment to those who were counting on computers to suddenly and dramatically alter the balance of power between individuals and their governments, but a look at human history suggests that it's no great surprise.

At its heart, Who Controls the Internet? is about the way national governments turn out to be able to exercise much more control over what people do on the Internet than most "visionaries" in the 1990s thought would be possible. The book begins with a discussion of John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace (2) and then demonstrates that the notion of a boundary-free Internet is; well, a bit exaggerated. After all, China has successfully suppressed dissidents online and has made it difficult for users to access content available in the United States; (3) the French government has successfully forced Yahoo! to stop selling Nazi memorabilia to users in France, (4) and so-called "data havens" like SeaLand--an offshore site for storing controversial information outside the reach of government regulation--have failed, (5) to name only a few examples.

"We know where you live" is an old threat. In recent years, the improvement of geolocation technology has let advertisers (and governments) map Internet users to real-world locations; at the same time, courts and regulatory agencies have shown a decreased willingness to defer to the Internet as some sort of special place. The result, as Goldsmith and Wu say, is an Internet that is becoming less independent and more geographically bordered. Barlow's vision of a separate and untouchable cybersphere is increasingly unrealistic. Interestingly, they also argue that this isn't so bad.

I very much enjoyed the book. But it will surely come as a dash of cold water to the more effusive strands of 1990s cyberlibertarianism, which held, as Barlow put it, that the Internet was beyond the jurisdiction of national governments, those "weary giants of flesh and steel." (6) Some of those cyberlibertarians dreamed of a worldwide revolution driven by technology that would just kind of, well, happen, without a lot of troublesome preliminaries or complications. Call it the revolutionaries' version of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck." (7) Such a vision turns out, alas, to be just as illusory in the political context as in the sexual.

I'm a cyberlibertarian of sorts myself, of course, but of a somewhat less effusive variety. And I think that although Who Controls the Internet? is a useful corrective to overblown views of effortless cyber-anarchy, it's also a mistake to see it as a proclamation of business as usual. Where the likes of John Perry Barlow erred was in seeing a singularity--an abrupt transition to a wholly different way of living--when what was really happening was a modest steepening in the curve of individual empowerment that has been going on for years. And Who Controls the Internet? doesn't deny that steepening, but it may understate its cumulative impact.

Though the communications revolution hasn't brought about an anarcho-libertarian global paradise, as once envisioned, that doesn't mean that it hasn't done any good. Chinese bloggers--and text-messagers--managed to end-run the Chinese government's...