Internet Bill of Rights – it’s still not making sense

At the Internet Governance Forum held Brazil, the issue of an “Internet Bill of Rights” has once again been brought up, as it was at last year’s forum. I said then that I thought it was a waste of time and my view has not changed. It’s a misinformed proposal based on a misconception of what the Internet is. Robin Gross of IPJustice, one of the primary initiators of the proposal, underlines this in a statement quoted on the BBC News web, where she claims that “rights issues on the net were ‘transnational’.”
Interesting… except that they are not transnational. At best, we could say that there is a net-layer that aspires to transcend nationality – but that is not the reality. Territoriality is very much alive and nations do impose their conceptions of “rights” within their domains. The issue of rights is therefore not an Internet issue, it is a general issue that should be, and is, addressed at a territorial level.