Unilateral Regulation of the Internet: A Modest Defence Jack Goldsmith Full text available: PDF format * Abstract First generation Internet scholarship maintained that the Internet undermined the feasibility of unilateral national or regional regulation. Today, the problem seems to be the opposite one of too much unilateral regulation by too many nations. Nations can do things within their territories to affect the cost of, and thereby regulate, transnational Internet communications. And since Internet communications can appear simultaneously in (and thus do harm in) many nations, many nations might assert unilateral regulatory control over Internet transactions. The result is a conflicts-of-law nightmare in which every nation regulates every Internet transaction. This article puts this purported conflicts nightmare into proper perspective. Section 1 explains how unilateral regulation of Internet transactions can be effective and (from the perspective of jurisdiction) legitimate. Section 2 explains why the threat of multiple national regulation of Internet transactions is significantly exaggerated. Section 3 addresses the spillover effects from unilateral national regulation. It explains that these spillovers do not affect the legitimacy of unilateral regulation, but they might argue for public and private harmonization strategies to eliminate the spillovers. Section 4 suggests that the prospects for such harmonization are generally dim. Unilateral national regulation will continue to be a primary vehicle of Internet regulation. * The free viewer (Acrobat Reader) for PDF file is available at the Adobe Systems.
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