Themes

Four stories, four themes, each a window onto one aspect of cyberspace that will be central in all that follows. My aim in the balance of this book is to work through the issues raised by these four themes. So then let me end this chapter with a map of the four, laid out in the order of the book. That order begins with story number two.

Regulability

Regulability means the capacity of a government to regulate behavior within its proper reach. In the context of the Internet, that means the ability of the government to regulate the behavior of its citizens (and perhaps others as well) on the Net. My second story, about gambling in Boral, was thus about regulability, or more specifically, about the changes in regulability that cyberspace brings. Before the Internet, it was relatively easy for the attorney general of Boral to control gambling within her jurisdiction; after the Internet, when the servers moved outside of Boral, regulation became much more difficult.

For the regulator, this story captures the problem that cyberspace presents generally. The architecture of cyberspace makes regulating behavior difficult, because those whose behavior you’re trying to control could be located in any place (meaning outside of your place) on the Net. Who someone is, where he is, and whether law can be exercised over him there—all these are questions that government must answer if it is to impose its will. But these questions are made impossibly difficult by the architecture of the space—at least as it was.

The balance of part 1 is about this question of regulability. I ask whether “unregulability” is necessary. Can we imagine a more regulable cyberspace? And is this the cyberspace we are coming to know?

Regulation by Code

The story about Avatar space is a clue to answering the question about regulability. If in Avatar space we can change the laws of nature—making possible what before was impossible, or making impossible what before was possible—why can’t we change regulability in cyberspace? Why can’t we imagine a cyberspace where behavior can be controlled?

For this, importantly, is just what Avatar space was. Avatar space is “regulated,” though the regulation is special. In Avatar space regulation came through code.The rules in Avatar space are imposed, not through sanctions, and not by the state, but by the very architecture of the particular space. A law is defined, not through a statute, but through the code that governs the space.

This is the second theme of this book: there is regulation of behavior in cyberspace, but that regulation is imposed primarily through code. What distinguishes different parts of cyberspace are the differences in the regulations effected through code. In some places life is fairly free, in other places controlled, and the difference between them is simply a difference in the architectures of control—that is, a difference in code.

Footnotes