In his influential 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte wrote that, by freeing us from “the baggage of history,” “digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.” The sense that the internet transcends the geopolitical boundaries of the physical world, that it creates a harmonious supranational community freed from old geographical and ethnic divisions, has continued to shape discussions and perceptions of the internet. It’s often said, for instance, that the very way the internet works – by distributing small packets of data through a global, “centerless” electronic web – is antithetical to national borders and will tend to thwart governments bent on imposing control over the flow of information.

Legal scholars Jack Goldsmith and Timothy Wu take a very different view. In Digital Borders, an article in the current issue of Legal Affairs that’s adapted from their forthcoming book Who Controls the Internet?, Goldsmith and Wu argue, persuasively, that the internet will come to be carved up along traditional geographic lines and that, in fact, this process is already well advanced: “the Internet is not, as many in the 1990s believed, an unstoppable technological juggernaut that will overrun the old and outdated determinants of human organization. To the contrary, the Internet itself is taking on the characteristics – good and bad – of the governments and people beneath it in different parts of the world.”

Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor, and Wu, from Columbia Law School, use a story about Yahoo! to underscore their point. In May 2000, the company was ordered by a French judge to prevent French web surfers from accessing Yahoo!-hosted auction sites that sold Nazi memorabilia. (Selling such memorabilia violates French laws passed in the wake of World War II.) Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang dismissed the ruling, saying, “We are not going to change the content of our sites in the United States just because someone in France is asking us to do so … Asking us to filter access to our sites according to the nationality of web surfers is very naïve.” His reaction, write Goldsmith and Wu, was to be expected:

Yang’s defiance reflected turn-of-the-century assumptions about the Internet’s architecture. Internet protocol addresses (each computer’s Internet ID), Internet domain names (such as mcdonalds.com or cnn.com), and e-mail addresses were not designed to indicate the geographical location of computers on the Net. These architectural “facts” meant that most users of 1990s Internet technology did not know where their e-mail messages and web pages were being viewed, and thus what laws in which nations they might be violating. Yahoo! said that it didn’t know where its users were, and which laws it should comply with.

At the trial, however, it became quite clear that Internet addresses could be – and routinely were – traced in such a way as to identify their geographic location – “with over 99 percent accuracy at the country level.” Although “Yahoo!’s lawyers reiterated that it was impossible to identify and filter out French visitors to the firm’s U.S.-based websites,” it was revealed that Yahoo was actually hosting the auctions on servers in Sweden for the purpose of distributing them in Europe. Moreover, the judge noted that “Yahoo! greeted French visitors to its U.S. website with French-language advertisements. This showed that Yahoo! was tailoring content for France and that, to some extent, it could identify and screen users by geography.”

In January 2001, Yahoo! backed down. “Soon after,” write Goldsmith and Wu, “the Chinese government insisted, as a condition of access to Chinese markets, that Yahoo! filter materials deemed harmful or threatening to the Communist Party’s rule. Yahoo! agreed to China’s demands, and by 2005, the company that was recently the darling of the Internet free-speech movement had become an important agent of thought control for the Chinese government.” By then, Yang had changed his tune about filtering content. “To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world,” he said, “we have to comply with local law.”

China’s use of filtering to curtail free speech represents “the downside of the bordered Internet,” say Goldsmith and Wu, but that doesn’t mean that the bordered internet is on balance a bad thing:

The bordered Internet is widely viewed to be a dreadful development that undermines the great network’s promise. But the Net’s promise was not fulfilled by the 1990s vision of an Internet dominated by the English language and the idiosyncratic values of the American First Amendment. People who use the Internet in different places read and speak different languages, and they have different interests and values that content providers want to satisfy. An Internet that accommodates these differences is a more effective and useful communication tool than one that does not.

People in different places, for example, disagree about what types of information they deem harmful. These differences are reflected in different national laws, and government officials charged with enforcing national values must enforce these laws, as cases like Yahoo! make clear … To understand the virtues of a bordered Internet, consider the opposite: an Internet dominated by a single global law. When you choose a single rule for six billion people, odds are that several billion, or more, will be unhappy with it. Is the American approach to Nazi speech right, or is the French variant? To what degree should gambling and pornography be allowed? Should data privacy be unregulated, modestly regulated, or heavily regulated? A single answer to these and thousands of other questions would leave the world divided and discontented.

The proposition that the internet can promote “greater world harmony” sounds lovely, but it begs a question: Harmony on whose terms? As Goldsmith and Wu imply, the idea of One Internet for All may be an expression of digital imperialism as much as anything else.