Law Commons^™

What’S In A Name?, Jonathan Zittrain

Federal Communications Law Journal

Book Review: Ruling the Root, Milton L. Mueller, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 301 pages.

A review of Milton L. Mueller's Ruling the Root, The MIT Press, 2002. In the spring of 1998, the U.S. government told the Internet: Govern yourself. This unfocused order-a blandishment, really, expressed as an awkward "statement of policy" by the Department of Commerce, carrying no direct force of law-came about because the management of obscure but critical centralized Internet functions was at a political crossroads. In Ruling the Root, Mueller thoroughly documents the colorful history both before and after this moment of inflection, and gives …

Global Trecs: The Regulation Of International Trade In Cyberspace, J. Steele

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This paper provides an overview of trade-related aspects of electronic commerce, and examines three approaches for regulating international trade in cyber- space. A model which integrates these approaches is then proposed, emphasizing private standards of self-regula- tion within a broader public framework of minimal background standards. A summary of potential areas of conflict between competing regulatory approaches fol- lows, and the paper concludes that both the WTO and the OECD have important roles to play in the develop- ment of international consensus towards a harmonized framework for the regulation of global TRECs.

Chinese Business And The Internet: The Infrastructure For Trust, Timothy L. Fort, Liu Junhai

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Although the Internet and E-commerce revolutions have clearly taken hold in the United States and Europe, the Chinese culture has been slow to adopt the Internet as a marketplace. The Authors cite a lack of trust on the part of both potential consumers and potential merchants as the primary obstacle to a robust Chinese E-commerce community. To remedy this lack of trust, the Article proposes the nation seek a middle way between reforms guided by Western rule of law and Eastern rule of ethics, thus incorporating effective regulatory strategies and the philosophical resources already within the Chinese cultural consciousness. The …