A History of Online Gatekeeping by Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology)
The bulk of this Article puts together the pieces of that history most relevant to an understanding of the law’s historical forbearance, describing a trajectory of gatekeeping beginning with defamation and continuing to copyright infringement, including shifts in technology toward peer-topeer networks, that has so far failed to provoke a significant regulatory intrusion. I argue that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grokster decision upholds this tradition of light-touch regulation that has allowed the Internet to thrive. The decision thus is not a landmark so much as a milestone, ratifying a continuing détente between those who build on the Internet and those in a position to regulate the builders.
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v19/19HarvJLTech253.pdf
A History of Online Gatekeeping by Jonathan Zittrain
The bulk of this Article puts together the pieces of that history most relevant to an understanding of the law’s historical forbearance, describing a trajectory of gatekeeping beginning with defamation and continuing to copyright infringement, including shifts in technology toward peer-topeer networks, that has so far failed to provoke a significant regulatory intrusion. I argue that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grokster decision upholds this tradition of light-touch regulation that has allowed the Internet to thrive. The decision thus is not a landmark so much as a milestone, ratifying a continuing détente between those who build on the Internet and those in a position to regulate the builders.