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Determining Place Regulations in Cyberspace:
Burning the Global Village to Roast the Pig
John S. Gossett and Tami Sutcliffe (C) 2007
University of North Texas
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Behavior on the Internet and Behavior in the "Real World"
Not all observers agree that human behavior on the Internet is inherently any different than human behavior in the real world. Almost ten years ago, a Harvard law school professor presented a famously calm argument (which was immediately and hotly contested) stating that cyberspace is really not much different than any other form of human communication and that existing systems of law should be able to deal with online conflicts fairly well (Goldsmith, 1998). One of the basic points of this argument was that when genuine online criminal behavior occurs, there must a human being at point A and a human being at point B, and any illegal activity which occurs can actually be identified as transactionally beginning and ending with these humans.

Many experts on both crime and Web protocol agree that existing laws should translate well to online environments. The problems, again, are the international nature of the network and the anarchic and transient characteristics of law breaking. (Frequently cited examples of successful online laws include the UK's Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994.) The theory that existing law and real life tend to work online about as well as they do in tangible physical space argues for the relative predictability of human behavior both offline and online and emphasizes how the Internet tends to complement rather than displace existing media (Robinson, 2003).

Traditional Place Restrictions and Online Communication

Public forum place restrictions can drastically affect even a "placeless" entity like the Web in several ways.
In 2006, there are three particularly interesting forms of free expression place restrictions related to Internet access:

  Restriction Type I: Free expression place restrictions enforced by a governmental agency which limit the way an individual may use the Internet in a public setting.

For more than ten years, librarians have been struggling to provide genuinely equitable public Internet access in public libraries. Existing legislation such as the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) forces citizens whose only Internet access is from institutions receiving federal funding (such as public libraries and schools) to connect and communicate through filters controlled by commercial entities without oversight. (Beeson, 1999).

EXAMPLE: The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires libraries and schools to install filters on their Internet computers to retain federal funding. The filters remove materials determined by the commercial vendors who produce the filters. There is no organized oversight of the filter content selection process.

 I am Big Brother filtering software

--from IamBigBrothers web site: - "IamBigBrother Records Everything Secretly. As with all of our monitoring software, IamBigBrother runs in total secrecy, and is very hard to find. IamBigBrother will not slow down your computer, or do anything noticeable to the user."

  Restricting Public Internet Access Through Filters
Filtering schemes are notoriously unreliable as safety nets for actual Internet content and although software is continuously improving, the basic structure of Internet filtering is dependent on a list of forbidden terms. These terms have to be decided upon and entered by human beings at some point, and the layers of misunderstanding, bias and simple error inherent in forbidding the use of words online are myriad. Creating viable filtering software is a growth industry in the U.S. (Rosenberg, 2001) despite the proven failures of these systems to either protect children from sexually related content online or to allow adults the freedom to use the Internet fully.

Many filtering critics argue that government encouragement of content filtering, or legal requirements for content-labeling software, is equivalent to censorship. Third-party attempts to analyze commercial filtering software have detailed the weaknesses of using word lists to restrict Web access. Even the latest versions of content filters routinely block unobjectionable sites while failing to block intended targets, and continue to block sites which contain forbidden religious and political terms. Among the four largest filtering software companies, the most frequently challenged forbidden sites include the Vatican, the National Journal of Sexual Orientation Law, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Organization for Women (Wikipedia, 2006).
  Further reading on this type of restriction:

Meeting CIPA Requirements With Technology:
By Richard W. Boss, PLA TechNotes

Implementing CIPA filtering in libraries:
American Library Association, Civil Liberties, Intellectual Freedom, and Privacy.