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Abstract:
Global computer-based communications cut across territorial borders, creating a new realm of human activity and undermining the feasibility--and legitimacy--of applying laws based on geographic boundaries. While these electronic communications play havoc with geographic boundaries, a new boundary, made up of the screens and passwords that separate the virtual world from the real world of atoms, emerges. This new boundary defines a distinct Cyberspace that needs and can create new law and legal institutions of its own. Territorially-based law-making and law-enforcing authorities find this new environment deeply threatening. But established territorial authorities may yet learn to defer to the self-regulatory efforts of Cyberspace participants who care most deeply about this new digital trade in ideas, information, and services. Separated from doctrine tied to territorial jurisdictions, new rules will emerge, in a variety of on-line spaces, to govern a wide range of new phenomena that have no clear parallel in the nonvirtual world. These new rules will play the role of law by defining legal personhood and property, resolving disputes, and crystallizing a collective conversation about core values.

Internet, Cyberspace, regulation

Abstract:
Three problems of online life - spam, informational privacy, and network security - lend themselves to the peer production of governance. Traditional sovereigns have tried and, to date, failed to address these three problems through the ordinary means of governance. The sovereign has a role to play in the solution to each of the three, but not as a monopoly and not necessarily in the first instance. A new form of order online, brought on by private action, is emerging in response to these problems. If properly understood and encouraged, this emerging order could lead to an accountable internet without an offsetting loss of those aspects of online life that we have found most attractive.

There has been a great deal of loose talk about the need for "internet governance," particularly in the context most recently of the World Summit on the Information Society, but much less careful analysis of the question whether the online world really does pose special problems, or present special opportunities, for collective action. There has been a general discussion as to whether the internet, as a general rule, lends itself to governance by traditional sovereigns or if something in the net's architecture resists such forms of control. We do not seek to re-open this debate, acknowledging at the outset the important role that traditional sovereigns have to play in most areas of decision-making and enforcement on the internet. Rather, we seek to look more closely at a series of particularly thorny issues that have proven especially challenging for policy makers seeking to impose governance by states. We seek the special problems - and corresponding opportunities - of online activity and assess the relative merits of various options for how to resolve them.

Internet governance, spam, privacy, and network security, democracy, peer production

Abstract:
Cyberspace represents a domain of human interaction that is as divorced from considerations of physical geography as any in human history. As we spend more and more of our time there, it will begin to stimulate new questions about, and insights into, the very fundamental role played by physical space, physical proximity, and physical power in legal and other rule-making systems. We have chosen to explore these questions through the lens of the theory of "complex systems." We discuss one efficient method of finding optimal configurations of complex systems--what Stuart Kauffman calls "patching," the division of a system into non-overlapping but coupled self-optimizing parts--and show that the efficiency of this problem-solving algorithm appears to depend crucially on the relationship between within-patch and between-patch spillover effects. Decentralized decision-making processes in socio-legal systems--systems of "competitive federalism"--may represent examples of this patching algorithm at work in the complex system of human rule-making institutions. We discuss the normative implications of this view for the design of such institutions where existing "patch boundaries" are being substantially perturbed (as is the case for interactions among geographically separated but newly connected individuals in cyberspace).

Abstract:
In an era of computer networks and peer production technologies we increasingly produce both democracy and culture collectively. The group, not the individual, is the central speech actor - the crucible where individual opinions are combined and refined and where the resulting group speech is translated into action amplified by money. The group is not merely an aggregate of individual opinions but a first order actor with its own distinct voice. Hence if we are concerned about the goals of the First Amendment, we do not need to focus simply on how to facilitate and regulate free expression by individuals. Rather, we need to focus on how people speak as a group and how technology might change the conditions for group speech on-line. Groups speak (and act) by coordinating the various roles of members of the group. The ability to manage roles is crucial to developing the trust and cohesion essential to acting as a group. But technology is changing the way we divvy up roles and the way we do deliberation as part of that process. These changes are not only affecting the way groups speak, but they may also be creating the conditions for new types of group speakers to form and new ways for the group to speak as a group. This Article argues that because new technology may radically alter what it means to assume roles, it can therefore change what it means to operate as a group online. Done right, the technology itself facilitates the more dynamic, flexible and effective groups essential to free expression. We explore this contention by examining technology's impact - the challenges and opportunities - upon the ability to define, adopt and implement roles within a group. We argue for the need to create the social grid loosely modeled on distributed grid computing that may offer a paradigm for managing roles. Finally, we propose greater use of the interactive graphical screen to make the roles participants play manifest on the screen. Together, the Social Grid and this Group Avatar may allow us to see more clearly that notionally fictional social groups (organizations) have real goals, memories, actions and speech of their own. By combining a schema for managing permissions with new kinds of visual screens we will be able more easily to assign and adopt roles within a group and to speak more effectively together.

First Amendment, Constitutinal Law, Cyberspace, Software, Organization, Group

Abstract:
This article explores how the EPA might use technology to improve the agency's level of scientific expertise and to obtain useful information faster to inform EPA policymaking. By creating a self-reinforcing collaboration between government and networked publics, new web-based tools could help produce change within government and without - namely governmental decisions informed by better data obtained through citizen participation and civic action coordinated with governmental priorities. The article discusses how EPA could use digital networking technologies to tap the expertise of members of the public to address specific "granular" scientific, economic, technological, policy, and other issues. Invoking Wikipedia and the successful Peer to Patent process used by the Patent Office to gain information and insight from dispersed experts in the patent examination process, the authors argue that collaborative web-based networking strategies could significantly improve regulatory decision-making, offset undue influence by industry and other organized interests, and provide a richer form of public participation than notice-and-comment rulemaking.