The history of technologies, not least information technologies, is replete with claims that a particular development will be highly ‘disruptive’ and will render obsolete established legal norms and regulatory frameworks. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration is the enthusiastic reception that cyberlibertarians gave the public Internet in the mid-1990s. At the time, some forecast not merely that specific legal constructs would be challenged, but that nation states would become obsolete. In that debate, the most famous example was the late John Perry-Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’.1 This included assertions that: “Governments of the Industrial World… You have no sovereignty where we gather…. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, and there is no matter here.” This rallying cry was wildly popular and many early web sites reproduced the full text or at least linked to it. Reports of the death of sovereignty were, however, exaggerated. When asked in 2004 to comment on his revolutionary tract, Barlow responded simply: “We all get older and wiser”. In fact, there has long been evidence that ‘online’ activities are likely to be subject, at least nominally, to more legal rules, and broader regulatory oversight, than comparable ‘offline’ activities.2 Admittedly, new technologies do not always fit easily into existing legislative and regulatory paradigms, and enforcement may be challenging, but lawmakers, regulators, and courts have so far managed to adapt, albeit with a time lag, to each wave of innovation.
