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choices?[9] If we ban Internet advertising, will that change the economic and social conditions that lie behind such choices?

It is nonsense to pretend that these are brand-new issues raised by the Internet, or to propose that there have never before been items that could be imported undetectably. By-passing national laws has always been an option for those rich, free, and leisured enough to travel, whether it was smuggling back banned books or pornography (or, in the case of Ireland in the 1970s, condoms), taking advantage of tax loopholes to store money in financial havens, or traveling to a liberal district or country to have an abortion. Abortion is one example of a banned purchase where there are no tangible goods to tax or confiscate; several thousand Irish women travel to England every year for just that purpose. Other intangible imports include exposure to cultural norms and media banned at home (films, plays, books, lectures) that may alter perceptibly someone's expectations of life (presumably one reason getting an exit visa was a sticky business in the former Soviet Union). If you're going to argue that some types of information must not be allowed to circulate, then you also have to ask whether, when cryptographic expert Matt Blaze leaves the country, he should be allowed to take his brain.

What the Internet will do is democratize, speed up, and extend these existing phenomena. Blaze can, undetectably, export at least some of the contents of his brain every day at low cost and high speed via email, just as someone from Britain might, Bandwidth willing, be able to view a copy of the film A Clockwork Orange, which is not available for public showing there. If you are going to seek to regulate the Net to eliminate those possibilities, you will have to deal with the fact that to a Netizen such a restriction on his freedom of mental movement feels like imprisonment. We no longer think the United States's McCarthy era refusal to issue passports to blacklisted musicians was a laudable policy, nor would we approve if Germany banned its citizens from visiting California because they might come in contact with Holocaust revisionists.

And yet, we are beginning to develop, even offline, a notion that a country's citizens might be responsible to their home country's legal system for their behavior abroad. Laws are beginning to pass in some countries against so-called "sex tourism," whereby (male) travelers take advantage of exotic locations to indulge sexual tastes that would be illegal or unacceptable at home, just as known "football hooligans," Britain's word for its violent soccer fans, may be banned from traveling to matches outside the country. Cyberspace has much in common with foreign countries, and people's behavior online has even more in common with people's behavior when they escape, however briefly, their real lives, where everything they do has consequences they have to live with. Cyberspace can give adults on a daily basis the kind of personal and intellectual experimentation that most of us only ever have for four years in college, if then. That's not all that's out there, of course, and those whose employers, spouses, and friends are all online with them don't experience that escape in the same way--I have always been conscious that anything I wrote online might be read later by someone I hoped to work for, and that's a strong motivator for me not to get into online fights or flame wars. If everyone gets online, eventually everyone will have those same real-life stakes, and that, more than any other change, may work to moderate at least some behavior.

Barlow, in dismissing the U.S. Congress from cyberspace's borders, did not think cyberspace could form any kind of government. But there certainly have been experiments within small online communities. The system of ballots on LambdaMOO is one such attempt, set up (like the U.S. government) as much to limit outside control (by the system's founder/wizard) as to protect the residents. A different scheme was tried on MediaMOO, a project set up by MIT Media Lab researcher Amy Bruckman to investigate online interaction in a professional context.

Because she felt that the system on LambdaMOO was a non-stop "horrendous flame fest," Bruckman instituted a form of representative democracy that involved a council and a voting system that was updated once an hour. A council member whose actions were unpopular could therefore be voted out of office almost at once. What Bruckman found was that the design made it possible for the council's