Das Internet, das Völkerrecht und die Internationalisierung des Rechts

Summary

The Internet, Public International Law and the Internationalisation of Law. International law and cyberspace are not worlds apart anymore. Although a single, unitary body of international cyberspace law does not exist, there art different international organisations competing with each other on the turf of international Internet regulation (with non-statal actors being part of the competition), mainly in the area of economic law (market access, E-commerce, intellectual property) and content control The question of the relevance of public international law for Internet regulation can not be answered without an idea of the nature of the Internet. The most convincing approach seems to be to emphasise the importance of technology (‘code is law’). Still, different examples indicate that technology can be influenced by law, thus ‘law trumps over code’. Therefore, the problem is not only to protect code from powerful private vested interests, but also to protect it from unilateral control by States more advanced in computer technology than others, thus imposing their values on others. This points to the international community and public international law as the appropriate forum for Internet regulation. Regulating the Internet will not be following classic legal paradigms of symmetry, hierarchy and centralized or top-down law. In that respect the law will follow the structure of the Internet. Thus, international law itself may also be modified, integrating elements of self-regulation, regulatory competition and atypical international organisations ( cf. ICANN). Some of these trends can be captured by the notion of ‘internationalisation of law’, which basically means ‘globalisation of law’.