Speech delivered at the Jefferson Society <http://www.jeffersonsociety.org/index.php> , University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 9, 2007, and at the Institute of European Affairs <http://www.iiea.com/> , Dublin, Ireland, September 28, 2007, as the inaugural talk for the IEA's "Our Digital Futures" program.
I want to begin by asking a question that might strike you as perhaps a little absurd. The question is, "Why haven't governments tried to regulate online communities more?" To be sure, there have been instances where governments have stepped in. For instance, in January of last year in Germany, the father of a deceased computer hacker used the German court system to try to have an article about his son removed from the German Wikipedia. As a result, wikipedia.de actually went offline for <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060119-6013.html> a brief period. It's come back online, of course, and in fact the article in question <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(Hacker)> is still up. Here's another example. In May of last year, attorneys general from eight U.S. states demanded that MySpace turn over the names of registered sex offenders lurking on the website, which as you probably know is heavily frequented by teenagers. The website deleted <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&art icleId=9019469> pages of some 7,000 registered sex offenders. And the following July, they said that in fact some 29,000 registered sex offenders had accounts, which were subsequently <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19936355/> deleted. Those are just a few examples. But we can make some generalizations. The Internet is famously full of outrageously false, defamatory, and offensive information, and is said to be a haven for criminal activity. This leads back to the question I asked earlier: why haven't governments tried to regulate online communities even more than they have? We might well find this question a little absurd, especially if we champion the liberal ideals that form the foundation of Western civil society. Indeed, no doubt one reason is our widespread commitment to freedom of speech. But consider another possible reason-one that, I think, is very interesting. Read the rest here: http://www.larrysanger.org/newpoliticsofknowledge.html --Larry
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