Redefining law in an interconnected, virtual environment

Whatever the original intention of the internet, the outcome has been interconnectivity. I wouldn't begin to suggest that the internet is the device that will necessarily bring the world together. Too many people remain disconnected, and such an outcome requires an amount of popular will unprecedented in history. Instead, the internet has heralded a new virtual community, created by anonymous characters who can assume whatever identity, postulate whatever philosophies, and post their ideas where they remain accessible almost forever. What the internet has done is created a virtual New Land of opportunity, one that doesn't require a lengthy voyage and massive capital to get to.

The result of all of this is an online entity that embodies the shared beliefs, conflicts, philosophies, stereotypes, ingorance, intelligence and willingness to progress that has always characterized a community of human beings. The instantaneous capability to communicate with an individual around the world - whose ideas may be completely different, or dazzlingly similar means that there is a degree of community that occurs. Without invoking a cliche, the global village is taking shape, although certainly not as simply as we might want to hope.

With new community come new problems, conflicts and pressures that the human race has never encountered before. This new community, however, being global in nature - separated by physical and cultural space, but brought together through virtual capabilities, as it becomes better defined and attempts to place boundaries around its composition, must turn to a codified set of rules to govern its own behavior. This is how law interacts with the internet on a global social scale.

Certainly there are national and international laws that have been created, are being discussed, and that will be created to dictate an individual's ability to access and utilize the internet. But the most important laws involving the great form of global information exchange have yet to manifest themselves. The new unity, or perhaps it should simply be called a new society, will incorporate the beliefs of phsyically separated people as they attempt to navigate a common space which is made to seem physical and scarce by time and technology restraints. The laws of this new landscape must address this issue.

Traditional notions of legal procedure will become obsolete. What will jurisdiction mean? What court structure will settle disputes between individuals across the world? The issues don't simply involve physical distance, and creating a system that is not economically prohibitive is important in creating a legal system.
Whose notions of justice and morality will be applicable? By the time this new society begins to turn to legal system to codify conduct, will there be new, globally recognized notions of justice? The meeting of so many philosophies will certainly alter notions of power based on race, class and geographic realities.

Most importantly,who will be excluded? Current costs prohibit many from accessing the internet. Those voices will be exlcuded as a new global law, created from the bottom up instead of handed down through traditional institutions, is given a history. These years, and the coming decades will establish the precedent of conduct when future courts look to commonly practiced behaviors over this medium. Will it be an anglo-dominated legal system? Will it be a system that finally recognize complicity and that injustice is a fact of traditional legal systems? Will the new legal system use traditional methods of administration, or will online dispute resolution come to supplant old legal structures to cope with the virtual nature of the internet?