Governments are incapable on their own to provide assurances as to which legal system applies to people's activities in cyberspace.

Jurisdiction in Traditional Terms

A basic measure of a country's sovereignty is its government's ability to exercise jurisdiction - that is, the ability to set, interpret, and enforce laws throughout the country's territory.

Challenges for Jurisdiction in Cyberspace

Activities in cyberspace are often detached from traditional geographical space, raising questions as to what portion of the Net any given country has a right to treat as falling under its jurisdiction.

Principles that one country holds sacrosanct may be anathema to another - for example, with free speech celebrated in the United States but considered a threat to morality in other locales. Clearly, it would be impracticable for each country to apply its own legal regime to the whole of the Net. What, then, is the extent of a country's legal domain in this space?

International Cooperation to Address These Challenges

Governments are incapable on their own to provide assurances as to which legal system applies to activities in cyberspace. Naturally, this is one of the thorniest issues in international Net governance, and one which begs for attention for the sake of predictability in e-commerce.

To add some clarity, governments have worked through the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) to draft model clauses for electronic contracts (spelling out, e.g., choice of law and choice of forum for disputes), as well as the Hague Conference to consider rules for the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. Meanwhile, governments are asking technical organizations to build geographic indicators into the Internet address system and into the devices connected to the network; these zoning initiatives allow a sort of "mapping" of the real world onto cyberspace.