Moving Across Mercurial Borders
     Because law traditionally has been hewn in by boundaries, governments are struggling to adopt new rules for a technology that steamrolls through borders, according to Gerold Herrmann, secretary of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Herrmann, who is working on a uniform law for digital signatures, said the speed of the Internet and its borderless nature are causing headaches for governments just now wading into cyberlaw. The solution, he said, will be found in global laws.
     "The Internet and electronic commerce is global, and it should be globally shaped," he said. "One has to make sure there is certainty and predictability."
     The border-breakdown has complicated commerce, as companies rethink their business models and regulators struggle to introduce more applicable policies or to maintain control of old ones. Phillip Thorpe, a managing director with the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority, warned that businesses and regulators can no longer rely on old-school policies. Thorpe called on business to cooperate across boundaries and for industry groups to pursue worldwide standards
     "We have to be inventive about the way we go about regulation," he said. "The Internet is making a mockery of global boundaries."

Tackling New Definitions
     If the Web has changed the meaning of boundaries, it's also changing the definition of culture. Charles Zhang, founder of Sohu, a Chinese-language search engine, remembers the day when he returned to China from the United States with a suitcase in each hand and a dot-com dream. At the time, he said, China was in the Dark Ages about the Internet. Fast forward a few years and China is bullish about the Web, with many of the nation's top students angling to join dot-coms when they graduate, according to Zhang.
     The Internet also has made a subtle impact on the Arab world, explained Michael Hudson, an Arab studies professor at Georgetown University. He said although the Internet is still a phenomenon embraced only by the wealthiest citizens in many Arab nations, entrepreneurs, plugged-in youth and a new crop of Arab intelligentsia are ushering in changes. And while there is still skepticism that the Internet is a tool of the West, Hudson predicted that the Web could cultivate a more liberal, political order in Arab nations.

Out With The Old, In With The New?
     Whether businesses, governments and citizens will adapt old-world polices with new technology challenges sparked by the Internet is another matter. While many experts and observers at the Global Internet Summit said the Internet and e-commerce create a need for more international cooperation, some acknowledged that it would be difficult to get governments to embrace global standards.
     When asked whether e-commerce would create the need for an international currency, John Richardson, head of the European Commission's Washington delegation, explained that just getting one currency within the European Union was difficult enough. Switching to a one-world currency would bring about the daunting task of creating a single monetary policy, something that's unlikely to happen.
     "We're not quite in the league of wanting to be global homogenists yet," he said.
- by Caroline Broder