Cyberspace is not some borderless new reality, separate and apart from the physical world.  It is not the death of distance. The statement in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” that, “[o]urs is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live,” and that,  “[y]our legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us,” was very, very mistaken.  The evidence that geography matters and that the nation states are alive and well in cyberspace has been accumulating for years.  See, for example, Jack Goldsmith’s 2006 book, “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.” And, today, we have more evidence that Goldsmith is right.

The BBC reports on January 26, 2012: “Twitter to selectively 'censor' tweets by country.” According to the BBC:

In its blog, Twitter said it could "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country".

But it said the removed content would be available to the rest of the world.

For better or for worse, we live in the same world as our ancestors – it just has a new communications system that can move tremendous amounts of data at near light speed to anywhere.

BBC News – Twitter to selectively 'censor' tweets by country

Cyberspace is not some borderless new reality, separate and apart from the physical world.  It is not the death of distance. The statement in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” that, “[o]urs is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live,” and that,  “[y]our legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us,” was very, very mistaken.  The evidence that geography matters and that the nation states are alive and well in cyberspace has been accumulating for years.  See, for example, Jack Goldsmith’s 2006 book, “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.” And, today, we have more evidence that Goldsmith is right.

The BBC reports on January 26, 2012: “Twitter to selectively 'censor' tweets by country.” According to the BBC:

In its blog, Twitter said it could "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country".

But it said the removed content would be available to the rest of the world.

For better or for worse, we live in the same world as our ancestors – it just has a new communications system that can move tremendous amounts of data at near light speed to anywhere.

BBC News – Twitter to selectively 'censor' tweets by country