A gold rush. A wide-open anything-goes frontier. Prostitution. Gambling. Drugs. Lax law enforcement. Vigilantism and mob justice. Petty scammers at every turn.
The subject? Not the dusty Wild West of American history, but instead the Internet of just 10 years ago.
In the last decade, the Internet has gone from open frontier populated by a select few, to a regular part of life for a majority of Americans and Europeans. Predictably, the change from sparse frontier to societal integration has caused rather significant cultural clashes between early adopters and latecomers. Disputes rage about whether we should view and regulate the Internet like an open frontier or like the rest of “offline” society.
This week, I will try to answer that question by exploring the similarities between the Internet and the original Wild West frontier. I’ll examine what the close of the Wild West frontier teaches us about the next 10 years of the Internet. As an example, I’ll focus on what the frontier experience tells us about online privacy and laws like Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. On Friday, I also hope to take a quick look at the broad impact of the Internet on the future of privac.
I look forward to discussing these issues with readers; this site has managed to consistently attract some of the brightest and most civilized commenters online. I’m happy to take questions, comments, and suggestions. And thank you, Eugene, for the kind introduction; I’m proud to be able to contribute to such an important community.
The Internet as Frontier Experience
The history of the Internet echoes the history of the American West. We go into much greater detail in the book (Amazon), but even at a glance the parallels between Wild West 1.0 (1800s America) and Wild West 2.0 (the Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s) are clear:
- In the case of the original Wild West, a few early pioneers cleared the way for the (literal) gold rush of the 1840s. Online, the pioneers of ARPANET cleared the way for the NASDAQ gold rush of the late 1990s. Millions of dollars were made (and lost) in just a few years.
- The early Internet and Wild West were both populated only by a small, self-selected group of pioneers who sought out adventure and fortune.
- Both started with dramatically gender-skewed populations, with more than five men for every woman at times–and as the frontier closed the gender ratio drifted back toward 50/50.
- Both the Internet and the original Wild West developed their own culture and manners. A sense of self-reliance and libertarian beliefs dominated in both places—a sense that any group could make their own fortune if they simply pulled hard enough on their bootstraps. In both places, the freedom to experiment was considered important enough to justify discarding many old laws and morals.
- Even the forms of vice on both frontiers are similar: sex, drugs, and gambling. In the Old West, prostitution was readily available, despite some nominal prohibitions. Online it was possible to find prostitution openly advertised on relatively mainstream sites like Craigslist. Gambling halls are rightfully a western movie cliché, and the early 2000s boom in Texas Hold ‘Em poker was largely attributed to online gambling. Even the drug of choice has not changed in 150 years—the old west was notorious for the availability of opium, and in the early days of eBay it was easy to buy opium for recreational use.
The Moment of Transition from Open Frontier to Integrated Part of Society
In the Old West, the lawless days of the “Wild” West frontier eventually came to an end. As eastern society caught up to the original Old West pioneers, a culture clash ensued. The gambling halls were shut down, prostitution was gradually regulated away in all but one state, and vigilantism was slowly replaced by formal law enforcement. Old-timers bemoaned the loss of the wild frontier; newcomers welcomed the stability of formal laws and familiar law enforcement.
Online, we are in the midst of the same transition from lawless frontier to integration with society. It has become routine to talk about government regulation of the Internet—ranging from “net neutrality” to Facebook privacy.
Looking again at vice, the government has started to shut down the most serious sex, drugs, and gambling. To take just a handful of examples, online gambling in the United States was curtailed in 2006 when the CEO of online gambling site BetOnSports was arrested as he changed planes in Texas, and the SAFE Port Act effectively banned online gambling by U.S. residents. The online sale of narcotics was deterred in 2003 when the DOJ cracked down on eBay opium sales. And online prostitution went at least somewhat underground in 2008 when 40 state attorneys general demanded that Craigslist remove its “erotic services” section (the practical effect of this move has been limited, but there are already renewed calls for further regulation).
This transition in the way the Internet is viewed and regulated–from a place frequented only by self-selected pioneers to part of everyday life for almost all of the West–creates a natural time to reexamine existing laws and consider whether they still fit the new reality of the Internet. Different countries have had the chance to experiment with different legal regimes online, and we’ve been able to watch how law shaped the growth of the Internet.
In particular, it’s a time to consider the difference between the legal regimes of open and closed frontiers. Open frontiers are often characterized by self-reliance, self-defense, exploration of new norms, and informal law enforcement. But the lax regulation of the Internet often comes at a great price: spam, scams, fraudsters, online lynch mobs, and more. Closed frontiers are often characterized by increasing similarity to the “old” society (often formed by combining elements of old and new), increasing formality, and active law enforcement.
We’re at a tipping point for the Internet. It started as a classic open frontier, with no almost no law and complete freedom to experiment. But society has caught up, and is demanding changes to make the Internet more like the rest of the world. For scholars and activists, the question is simple: how to keep the best parts of the Internet while while successfully integrating with offline society?
Ultimately, the lesson from the original Wild West is clear: in the end, the Internet will not stay wild forever. Instead, “offline” society and the Internet will meet somewhere in the middle, each taking something from the other. Now is the time to consider how we can best shape the future of the Internet using what we’ve learned by watching the close of other frontiers.
Tomorrow: Why Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 doesn’t work in 2010.
David Thompson is co-author of the leading Internet policy book of 2010, Wild West 2.0 (Amazon) and general counsel of ReputationDefender, Inc.. The standard disclaimer applies: the views represented here are his alone and not those of any current or former employer.
Martinned says:
Will you also be discussing the European on-line gambling cases, like last week’s Sporting Exchange and Ladbrokes? Both follow last year’s Grand Chamber ruling in Liga Portuguesa and hold that the Member States are allowed to restrict online gambling within their jurisdictions even when the would-be supplier of such services is doing so lawfully from a different Member State. However, the court tends to reach such holdings not without difficulty.
June 7, 2010, 3:31 pmDavid Thompson says:
@Martinned
That’s a great point about regulation of online gambling in Europe. The fact that there exists discussion of national regulations suggests that we’ve come a long way from the early days of offshore sites that were only self-regulated. The growing trend toward regulation and harmonization of online and offline gambling is a great sign of the increasing maturity of the Internet. We went from “do anything you like” to “follow this book of regulations.”
June 7, 2010, 3:54 pmSeaDrive says:
IMHO, the most important feature to protect is universal access. As it stands now, any idiot with a computer and internet access can put up a website, and that’s how it should be.
June 7, 2010, 4:05 pmBlue says:
We knew at the time it was the Wild West and that regulation was coming…you could probably find some fascinating old discussions from the mid 1990s in that vein.
Also, the true Gold Rush days of internet gambling were in the late 1990s. For a couple of years you could use credit lines to finance massive amounts of gambling…and the sector was almost entirely self-policed by gamblers. What killed it wasn’t the arrest in 2006; it was first the credit card issuers changing their policies in 1999/2000 to treat gambling deposits as cash advanced. That led to the rise of Paypal and a couple of other deposit mechanisms for awhile. The death knell of Wild West online gambling was post-9/11, when collecting and sending thousands of dollars to dodgy banks in Lebanon and Costa Rica began to come under a ton more scruitiny.
June 7, 2010, 4:19 pmSuperSkeptic says:
“self-reliance, self-defense, exploration of new norms and informal law enforcement” all sound pretty good. “Spam, scams, [and] fraudsters” not so much, but relatively easily avoided. And I can’t say that I know what an “online lynch mob” is or why I would ever be afraid of one; nor what constitutes “more” of the “great price” we are paying for the freedom that is the internet. Thus, I have to say, I am starting this discussion with a strong presumption in favor of tacking toward the wild west internet in any attempt to “harmonize” or “balance” the real world with the internet world.
June 7, 2010, 4:26 pmKamal says:
Very interesting.. of course, with encryption and the fundamental equality of information on the internet the-powers-that-be can’t win this fight. Take a look at the pirate bay and check out their legal page. It would take a fundamental restructuring of the internet to make any sort of widespread control possible. As Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails stated, information is free. Trying to fight it is pointless.
June 7, 2010, 5:04 pmKamal says:
The internet is geographically neutral (for the most part). How do you propose we reconcile the geographical neutrality of the internet with the geographical dependence of the law?
June 7, 2010, 5:06 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » The Closing of the Internet Frontier? :PC & Internet Lifestyle says:
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June 7, 2010, 5:28 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » The Closing of the Internet Frontier? :PC & Internet Lifestyle says:
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June 7, 2010, 5:28 pmgs says:
I’ll provisionally go along with the frontier analogy.
1. Unfortunately, a pun suggests itself. IMO you are also describing the transition of the West(ern civilization) from an expanding culture of risk-takers, explorers and innovators to a place where sheep graze (safely–until the formerly subdued predators revive).
2. I suspect that the move toward Internet regulation, should it succeed, will correspond to a transition from Wild West California directly, not to the California where many lived the American Dream for generations, but to today’s California which has been mismanaged into stagnation and danger of collapse.
I am not opposed in principle to regulation. However, within ten years the USA’s elites “led” us from the brink of the Second American Century into the current mess. And they continue to demand more power.
A civil formulation of my reaction does not come to mind.
June 7, 2010, 6:02 pmFub says:
“…Started to shut down…”, “curtailed”, “deterred” and “went at least somewhat underground” actually mean “continued to happen just as frequently but somewhere else”.
Prohibitionists rarely if ever grow up, and rarely lose their compulsion to poke their noses into everybody’s bedroom and parlor, just in case somebody somewhere might be enjoying something that offends their delicate moral sensibilities.
So, they always make “renewed calls for further regulation” when they discover that someone has escaped their legal crackdown. They always try to give credibility to their calls for greater invasion of privacy and greater penalties by citing the “underground economy” and “gangland connections” of the vices.
Of course, if they simply stopped trying to stamp out the vices they love to hate, they would find that the underground economy and gangland connections would vanish.
The only benefactors of crackdowns on internet sex, drugs and gambling will be the same as the benefactors in meat space: vice cops, preachers, and grandstanding politicians.
June 7, 2010, 6:06 pmBach2Bach says:
With all due respect David, I’m not familiar with your other works on this subject, but the tone of this article suggests that you’re going to be taking a very pro-regulatory position on the internet and this is scary to me both for economic and free-speech considerations.
First, the internet helps create jobs. Not just good jobs, but jobs that help create entire industries. Any regulation, even well-intentioned regulation, is going to place more and more of a burden on existing businesses, and an economic barrier on new ones. This would be horrible anytime, but devastating in these troubled times. Of course, there’s only one industry that more laws help, the legal profession.
Second of all, and most importantly, this is the last bastion of free-speech. The media is very corrupt and the internet is usually the only way to get certain bits of politically correct information to the masses. Some Australian politicians, for example, were recently trying to pass some bill that banned anonymous commenting online. Their bogus excuses were protecting children from predators or stopping terrorism or some such nonsense, but any thinking man should be able to tell that this has everything to do with controlling public opinion and preventing criticism of government.
Regulating the internet in any way is horrible to me. Yeah, you’ve got your http://www.dirtyphonebook.com and 4Chan and other depravities online, but you can’t have the advantages of freedom without taking the disadvantages as well. I will be looking forward to your piece tomorrow and I hope that it doesn’t argue for more regulation because I would oppose that very strongly. The internet has done quite well with minimal regulation and it should remain that way forever in my opinion.
PS: This is an aside, but for the record, the Wild West wasn’t nearly as Wild as popular films and literature suggest. The amount and types of violence that occurred were romanticized in literature and there was a framework of law and a respect for property rights that in many ways was even stronger than what exists today.
June 7, 2010, 6:08 pmDaniel Boulet says:
While there is something to the notion that “law and order” has begun to arrive in many parts of the Internet, the plague of spam and malware is at least as virulent as ever and is, if anything, getting worse over time. The ability to use the Internet without having to worry much if at all about geography and political boundaries is, at least in some sense, the Internet’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Of course, another of the Internet’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses is the relative ease with which one can act with essentially if not totally complete anonymity.
Frankly, “the law” will not have truly arrived in the Internet until there is a forum/process whereby an arbitrary Internet user can obtain justice/satisfaction against a party which has done them harm irrespective of the nationality or geographic location of either the aggrieved party or the evildoer. I do not hold out much hope that such a forum/process will come into existence any time soon.
P.S. Somehow I suspect that it might be just a tad difficult to convince a small business owner or even a municipality whose bank account has just been emptied by thieves operating with effective impunity from far off lands that there is any meaningful notion of justice or even law when it comes to the Internet of today.
June 7, 2010, 7:32 pmChris Travers says:
Furthermore you have a problem. There’s no set of regulations governing the internet. Rather there are regulations that govern behavior affecting geographic regions. This is problematic because it just isn’t possible to know what country’s laws in advance that one might violate unwittingly by operating a business online. This creates a problem for me and every other business owner, but it even creates a problem for every individual who is online.
I don’t see how this problem can be rectified without giving pro-censorship governments of the world a decisive say in how the internet would be regulated. I think a better solution is to tell countries like Australia that if they want to censor the view of their citizens, that this is perfectly OK, but that they can’t prosecute non-Australian persons for violating their rules.
June 7, 2010, 10:39 pmCharlie says:
I’d prefer to be targeted by an “online lynch mob” rather than an offline lynch mob, but this and this were what sprang immediately to mind when I read the phrase. I’m not arguing that there needs to be more government regulation of the internet–I know nothing about the topic. But I do think the internet offers more–and more effective–opportunities for character assassination than anyone had to worry about a decade or two ago.
June 7, 2010, 10:40 pmsep332 says:
It’s a fun analogy, but I don’t think it should be taken nearly so far. Business is being conducted online *in spite of* all the dangers and downsides. Banks are moving vast sums of money over unreliable networks owned by unknown private parties via secret paths, but it’s still worthwhile. The advantages of the Internet outweigh the risks. Almost everyone will benefit from being on an open Internet compared to no Internet. This is not true of a physical frontier.
However, a secure Internet is more useful for business than an open Internet. The businesses will continue to demand law and order until people push back, until the pressure to stabilize equals the pressure to remain open. The Internet will be squeezed a lot harder before it pushes back as hard as the lawmen are pushing forward. The “steady state” of the Internet will be a lot more closed than it is now, unless we push harder to shift the equilibrium.
June 7, 2010, 10:42 pmsep332 says:
Also, and this may be offtopic, but why is gender skewed in the new frontier? It made (some) sense in the old days, men were culturally expected and trained to be stronger and more independent. But you’d think that disenfranchised groups would make more use of the Internet. Anyone who wasn’t happy with the way they were being treated or portrayed in “real life” could carve out a friendly niche for themselves online. But what reason could there be for such gender disparity online??
June 7, 2010, 10:49 pmChris Travers says:
This is a very serious issue. I think a better comparison to the internet is to the high seas instead of to the wild west. Regarding the high seas, people still had to have land-based bases, and these could even be the subject of wars. The Wild West ceased to be wild as population density increased, but it didn’t have the international elements that the high seas did.
Regulation of the internet along a wild west model would mean giving countries like Iran and China control over what could be said online simply because of the nature of land-based law as applied to an international area. Given the choice of letting China regulate internet access in China, and letting them regulate internat access affecting China, the choice should be clear to all of us.
Well, there’s that. There’s also the fact that “the law” would have to be documented and understandable. We haven’t moved really to “follow these regulations” in any way in which anyone can understand what set of regulations one actually has to follow.
June 7, 2010, 11:24 pmAnatid says:
In the early days of the internet, who were the users?
Programmers. Gamers. People in the technology industry. Shut-ins. Categories that were then, and still largely are today, male-dominant.
Now, with the rise of social networking websites and an incredibly diversification of internet destinations, there’s something for everyone. You don’t have to be a nerd in order to use a computer; every ordinary person has one.
You still might want to hesitate before admitting that you’re female on Battle.net, though.
June 8, 2010, 12:03 amFlimflam says:
I liked this article more when it was posted on the Escapist under the title Go Virtual, Young Man: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_135/2893-Go-Virtual-Young-Man
June 8, 2010, 12:11 amChris Travers says:
Well, it’s also interesting to note that in open source the general gender ratios are a bit more than 50 men per woman. Interestingly the main projects I’ve been working on have ratios much closer to 2:1 (which is close to the ratio of software engineers working on commercial projects generally).
June 8, 2010, 2:38 amGil says:
What? No mention of the IPv4 crunch?
June 8, 2010, 4:29 amRicardo says:
In practice, that’s really only a problem if you upset someone in the country enough that the country’s police launch an investigation and issue an arrest warrant and then you unwittingly set foot on the country’s territory. Extradition treaties rarely cover conduct that is not a crime in the country you are physically present in. As I recall, when Austria sought to have David Irving arrested for Holocaust denial, they waited until he was back in Austrian territory rather than engage in the futile exercise of asking the U.K. to extradite him.
I suspect that people who, say, criticize the King of Thailand online and who are prominent enough to be noticed and read by lots of people probably have the sense to put off that trip to the country. Same goes for people who are harshly critical of China, Singapore or other such countries.
I wonder how this would work in practice. The U.S. certainly reserves the right to prosecute foreign nationals for hacking offenses launched from outside the U.S. and has exercised that right. If the U.S. goes to China and demands that none of its citizens ever be prosecuted for posting things against Chinese law on the internet from outside China, China may turn around and demand that none of its citizens be prosecuted for hacking from within China. Would the U.S. government agree?
June 8, 2010, 5:32 amBrett Bellmore says:
Why should it? Surely we can distinguish between hacking, and expressing opinions? Not that China would, in practice, so distinguish, of course, but the somewhat less oppressive nations of the world don’t have to humor them when they argue that political dissent is a real crime.
Any more than China will humor us when we argue that China’s ongoing cyberwarfare is something they should stop.
June 8, 2010, 6:25 amsep332 says:
A recent survey of Mozilla Test Pilot users turned out 96% male. http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/test-pilot-participants-heavily-skewed-towards-early-adopters/ Jono says this looks normal for early adopters of technology in general. I don’t understand why early adopters would skew SO HARD toward one gender, especially (as Anatid and Chris Travers pointed out) now that the Internet in general is much more balanced.
June 8, 2010, 7:54 amMax says:
“Society” would never have caught up to (or more accurately, “over-taken”) the Wild West had there not been a fixed bounding coastline encompassing a finite quantity of land which would inevitably prove to be insufficient to satisfy unlimited future demand. The fact that the Internet has no such hard limits renders your appeal to this analogy highly questionable. The move that you *seem to be* advocating sounds a lot more like the Enclosure Acts — i.e., a contingent power grab by established elites to preempt the possibility of future threats emerging as a result of experimentation and innovation occurring outside of their sphere of control. But perhaps too soon to judge — will look forward to reading the book…
June 8, 2010, 9:42 amLargo says:
I look forward–in hope!–to the ascendancy of
June 8, 2010, 10:02 amBama 1L says:
Porn.
June 8, 2010, 1:00 pmLeo Eko says:
Actually, geography is not history–not even on the Internet!
June 8, 2010, 2:56 pmThe most recent example is Pakistan’s ban on Facebook and Youtube because of cartoons published on May 20, 2010 (Everybody Draw Mohammed Day).
Chris Travers says:
Yeah, but the gender gap in porn consumption is closing (now at about 60% men, 40% women). Does this mean that the pornography fronteer is closing?
June 9, 2010, 1:52 amChris Travers says:
Almost certainly the US government wouldn’t agree. However, hacking offences have a substantial nexus to the prosecuting country that, say, offering Nazi memorabilia for sale (Yahoo) does not in the sense that it involves at least an affirmative attempt to access a computer in the foreign country. I’d allow an exception for cases where affirmative actions were taken to create such a nexus. For example, offering for sale something that’s contraband somewhere is not the same thing as boxing it up and shipping it to that place where it’s illegal.
June 9, 2010, 2:00 amMax says:
Geography may not “be” history, but history absolutely is (or rather becomes, under certain circumstances) geography. When Pakistani authorities attempted to do the same thing (block domestic access to Youtube) in Feb. 2008, they failed to reckon with the natural/default “extra-territorial” nature of Internet service delivery, and as a result caused a temporary global-scope Youtube blackout. Two-plus years later, armed with more clue and better hardware, they now possess more technical capability to selectively implement ad hoc “exceptions” to the global reachability (e.g., of Internet content) that is a natural/default feature of Internet addressing and routing.
Ian Bremmer will need to add an Internet chapter to the next edition of his most recent book…
June 9, 2010, 7:17 amThe Communications Decency Act of 1996 Meets the Closed Frontier | theConstitutional.org says:
[...] online communication does not tell us whether it deserves subsidy. Yesterday, I explained why the Internet is a new frontier. Today, I challenge that Section 230 the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides a subsidy to [...]
June 10, 2010, 9:32 amGoogle Changed Reputation and Privacy Forever | theConstitutional.org says:
[...] Monday, we discussed why the Internet is a new frontier. On Tuesday ‚we questioned whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 still [...]
June 10, 2010, 9:37 amFixing the CDA 230 Subsidy While Preserving Online Anonymity | theConstitutional.org says:
[...] Monday, we discussed why the Internet of 2010 resembles the closing of the Wild West frontier. On Tuesday, we talked about whether CDA 230 is appropriate for the Internet of 2010. [...]
June 11, 2010, 2:25 pm