But I have learned enough in this business to know that I can’t convince you of this with an argument. (I’ve spent the last five years talking about this subject; at least I know what doesn’t work.) If you see the point, good for you. If you don’t, I must show you. So my method for readers of the second sort must be more indirect. Proof, for them, will come in a string of stories, which aim to introduce and disorient. That, again, is the purpose of this chapter. Out of confusion, something useful will emerge.

Let me describe a few other places, and the oddities that inhabit them.

Governors

A state—call it “Boral”—doesn’t like gambling, even though some citizens like to gamble. But the state is the boss; the people have voted; the law is as it is. Gambling in the state of Boral is illegal.

Then comes the Internet. With the Net wired into their phones, some citizens of Boral decide that Internet gambling is the next “killer app.” Someone sets up servers that provide access to online gambling. The state doesn’t like this business; the businessmen are just illegal gamblers. Shut down your servers, the attorney general warns, or we will lock you up.

Wise even if dishonest, the gamblers agree to shut down their servers in the state of Boral. But they don’t exit the gambling business. Instead, they rent space on a server in an “offshore haven.” This offshore web server hums away, once again making gambling available on the Net and accessible to the people of Boral via their Internet phones.  


For here’s the important point: given the architecture of the Internet (at least as it was), it doesn’t matter where in real space the server is set up. Access doesn’t depend on geography. Nor, depending on how clever the gambling sorts are, does access require that the user know anything about who owns or runs the real server. The user’s access can be passed through anonymizing sites that make it practically impossible in the end to know what went where.

The Boral attorney general faces a difficult problem. She may have moved the gamblers out of her state, but she hasn’t succeeded in reducing gambling on the Net. She once would have had a group of people she could punish, but now she has made them essentially free from punishment. The world for this attorney general has changed. By going online, the gamblers moved into a world where behavior, so the argument goes, is no longer regulable.

Regulable. I am told there is no such word, though lawyers apparently do not know that fact. By “regulable” I mean simply that a certain behavior is capable of regulation. The term is comparative, not absolute—in some place, at some time, a certain behavior will be more regulable than at another place and in another time. My claim about Boral is simply that the Net makes gambling less regulable there than it was before the Net.

Footnotes