Silicon Insider: Is the Net American?

B U R L I N G A M E, Calif., Aug. 15, 2000 -- Is the Internet American?

That seems a silly question. After all, this is the age ofglobalization. Technology is no longer supposed to be geographically determined. The experience of surfing the Net — as I did in the last monthfrom Germany, Namibia and England — is the same everywhere. How many timeswhen purchasing something on an e-auction site have you been amazed todiscover that the seller is in Australia or France?

And yet, even as we pat ourselves on the back for being so enlightenedand cosmopolitan, we might take a moment and ask if our perspective might bea little jingoistic after all.

I found myself pondering this while reading about the Yahoo! censorshipcase currently under way in Paris. In case you haven’t heard — and the buried coverage of the case says something equally striking about our attitude towards the rest of the world — two French anti-racism advocacy groups have sued Yahoo! over the appearance of Nazi paraphernalia on its auction site (illegal in France, but legal in the United States). The French court, the Tribunal de Grande Instance, hasdelayed its judgment, which could amount to a fine of $90,000 per day if Yahoo! doesn’t figure out how to block access by French citizens toparts of the site. The ruling will come after a three-month study by an expert panel.

What makes the case doubly interesting is that the auctions in questionreside not on some Yahoo! server in France, but here in Silicon Valley.Thus, if Yahoo! were to simply acquiesce, it could be seen as operatingagainst the First Amendment of the Constitution.

We Are the Net

And there’s the rub. I suspect most people reading the story simplyshrugged and muttered, “Well, after all, it’s the French.” True enough, butdon’t you think it’s also the Afghans and the Russians, the Japanese and theSouth Africans, the Bolivians and the Inuits? Just imagine what theInternet feels like to them. Probably like a first-time visitor toManhattan, a place of bright lights and amazing sites, as well as the mostdegraded experiences, where the rich race by in limousines andshopkeepers set up tiny storefronts, where crime and lust hold sway over dark alleys,and tabloid gossip shrieks from every street corner.

We Americans are comfortable with the Net because it is us. Loud,commercial, fast, a Wild West show where the quickest gun rules. We neverstop to consider that it is de facto run byAmerican law, especially the First Amendment, or that it is largelycontrolled by a few square miles around San Jose, Calif., and Tyson’sCorners, Va., or that its currency is the dollar and its linguafranca American pop slang. But you can be sure the rest of the worldnotices.

And so, I suspect we are about to get a nasty surprise.

Just Like Us

As always, weAmericans assume that everyone is just like us; and when they are not, thatthey will happily (and with great relief) accept our way of doing things.The French case, I think, is a harbinger of the future, and we had all besthear its whisper.

We like to the think of the Internet as being the great equalizer,bringing all the world together on the common ground of the World Wide Web;and as the great emancipator, freeing the minds and the imaginations ofbillions of people currently trapped in totalitarian societies and dreamingof liberation. But what if the rest of the world doesn’t see it the sameway? What if people in the rest of the world end up seeing the Internet asthe ultimate new form of American social imperialism? And what if people intraditionalist countries come to the see the Net not as an instrument ofliberation, but of enslavement to the decadent, depraved and frenetic West? And finally, what if those tyrants out there, who read the same techmagazines we do, decide they don’t want their populations liberated?

Better and Worse

I can’t say often enough that the final word on the Internet is not yetin. Its greatest, and worst, days are still ahead of it … and we have noidea of its final form. The technology alone has several generations yet togo. And so, too, does its social impact. And if we Americans in the tech business look out upon the landscape of the Net and see only open territoryand endless opportunity, then perhaps we are no different from our pioneerancestors gazing over the Great Plains, just before the barbed wire wentup. The cities and towns that ultimately arose on that frontier were betterand worse than the utopian dreams behind them. So, too, with the infinitereaches of cyberspace.

The fate of our fantasy of an I-world right now rests in the hands of aParisian court. It’s a chilling thought.

Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” is editor of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised. For more, go to Forbes.com. And you can talk back to Silicon Insider via e-mail or through an ongoing bulletin board.