Linking and the Law

Ashok Malhotra and I (with help from a few friends) wrote a short blog post  "Linking and the Law" as a follow-on of the W3C TAG note Publishing and Linking on the Web (which Ashok and I helped with after its original work by Jeni Tennison and Dan Appelquist.)

Now, we wanted to make this a joint publication, but ... where to host it? Here, Ashok's personal blog, Adobe's, the W3C?

Well, rather than including the post here (copying the material) and in lieu of real transclusion, I'm linking to Ashok's blog: see "Linking and the Law".

Following this: the problems identified in Governance and Web Architecture are visible here:

1. Regulation doesn't match technology
2. Regulations conflict because of technology mis-match
3. Jurisdiction is local, the Internet is global

These principles reflect the difficulties for Internet governance ahead. The debates on managing and regulating the Internet are getting more heated. The most serious difficulty for Internet regulation is the risk that the regulation won't actually make sense with the technology (as we're seeing with Do Not Track).
The second most serious problem is that standards for what is or isn't OK to do will vary widely across communities to the extent that user created content cannot be reasonably vetted for general distribution.