Chapter 1
The communist in Europe was ended but in the mid-1990 a new society was formed called cyberspace. Cyberspace became a target for libertarian utopianism. The government could not regulate cyberspace. Cyberspace was free and governments could not do anything to control. “The society of this space would be a fully self-ordering entity, cleansed of governors and free from political hacks.” In cyberspace code regulates quite differently, the software and hardware makes cyberspace what it is and also regulate cyberspace as it is. The author quotes “We are at a stage in our history when we urgently need to make fundamental choices about values, but we should trust no institution of government to make such choices.”
Chapter 2
Cyberspace is more than just email, Amazon and Google. Many people who are over the age of 40 there is no such thing as cyberspace but for their children it’s a “second life”. Chapter 2 explains cyberspace in 4 points by explaining four different stories. Two describes cyberspace and the other two describe characteristics of the Internet. The lesson of the first theme is “regulability” which explains how regulation in cyberspace can help people see how all regulation works. The second theme is “Regulation by Code.” This theme explains how regulation will render ambiguous certain values that are fundamental to tradition. The third theme is “latent ambiguity.” In this theme the point is that ambiguity will require the United States, to make a choice. The fourth theme is ”competing sovereigns”. The author states that “the hardest problem will be to reckon these “competing sovereigns,” as they each act to mark this space with their own distinctive values.” He concludes that he believes the Net can be regulated.
Chapter 3
Cyberspace is a place where nature has no rule, a place that is constructed, but is cofused with how something is and how it must be. ”But how cyberspace is is not how cyberspace has to be. There is no single way that the Net has to be; no single architecture that defines the nature of the Net”. People are used to thinking how the way they find things is the way things have to be. People don’t think about how technology works, it works like plastic, it can be remade to do different things.
Chapter 4
Chapter emphasizes how if you don’t know someone, don’t know where they are, or what they are doing you can’t regulate them. The behavior of that person will remain how they want it to be. This is an example of the internet. You can try to regulate young people from using social sites but they can lie and say they are older. The technologies people use has three ideas identity, authentication, and credential to identify who someone is. “Identity” is more than a person identity; it’s your name, your sex, where you live, what your education is, your driver’s license number, your social security number, your purchases on Amazon.com, and where you worked at. “Authentication” is when people want to become more confident about the truth about some asserted claim. “Credential” is defined as a standardized device for authenticating (to some level of confidence) an assertion made.
Chapter 5
There are now technologies to help know who is on the net and where they are. This helps with businesses and its makes the net a lot safer. These technologies are to help make the Net more reguable but it’s not perfectly reguable. This chapter discusses examples that address a behavior that the government wants to regulate.It cannot easily regulate directly. In the examples ”the government regulates that behavior indirectly by directly regulating technologies that affect that behavior.” The conclusion of this chapter is that there are indeed similar ways that the government might regulate code on the Internet to make behavior on the Net more regulable.
