This book is about change. Change brought on by advances in technology and the effects on society and, in turn, how the law copes with those changes. This is not meant to be a “law book”– at least not in the sense that you can turn to a page and immediately read a definitive answer as to what the state of the law is on any given topic. In the Internet Age, in a world where changes occur at light speed on a daily basis, the only state of the law is the state of flux.

Issues in Internet Law: Society, Technology, and the Law is a view of the law through the prism of society and culture. Advances in technology have always changed societies, and there has never been as far-reaching and profound an advance as the Internet. By reaching across all borders into all societies and cultures, the Internet has created a single virtual world – a melting pot where each society’s cultures, mores, and values are interchanged. Differing political, religious, and cultural ideas, practices and beliefs assail web visitors at each mouse click. From the comfort of your living room you can enter the website portal into the world of a Muslim boy in Afghanistan, a Russian girl in the Ukraine, a Japanese student, a Klansman in Alabama, a gay man in San Francisco, or a bedridden woman whose only contact with the outside world is the Internet. A woman in China learns what life is like for her counterpart in London, a Jewish boy reads the daily blog of an Arab teenager, while an evangelical preacher’s son reads the online diary of a young man describing coming to grips with the realization of his own homosexuality. It would be impossible for the Internet not to change the very fabric of every society on earth.

Some nations want to block access to, or at least filter, content on the Internet. Marketers realize the Internet provides unsurpassed access to consumers, but such access may entail threats to privacy, manipulation of children, risk of fraud, and undesired annoyances such as spam. The Internet has become the world’s largest, most pervasive soapbox where anyone and everyone can have their 15 minutes of fame. But the downside of such unlimited global access is that the megaphone of the Internet can be used to disseminate misinformation, libel, and hate speech. Laws are required to protect consumers, investors, children, and those who are defamed, or subjected to hate speech. But with hundreds of nations, each with its own jurisprudence, cultural and societal mores, philosophies, and legal systems, which laws will prevail and – even if every nation on earth shared the same jurisprudence – how could any single nation apply its laws to a technology that knows no boundaries? The Internet is like a giant snake slithering across every country – each nation focuses on the portion of the snake it sees and tries to apply its jurisprudence to that portion. Issues in Internet Law: Society, Technology, and the Law looks at the attempts of nations to overlay their laws upon the Internet.