These are very hard problems, and there is no silver bullet. However, some solutions are much worse than others. Many solutions threaten the character of the Internet and must be considered with great care.

We see many risks that threaten the Internet's current character if governments make poor regulation choices. Some are detailed below.

Attempts at perfect enforcement will come with massive cost. Consider a country that is dead-set on ensuring that its citizens can access no objectionable content via the Internet. If the government truly chose that goal over utility of the Internet, many terrible measures could follow. For example, all encrypted connections from outside the country could be used for illicit purposes without the government having a way to find out. The only solutions would be to either block connections that appear to use encryption or demand a backdoor into all encryption. Both would dramatically harm the utility of the Internet for private communication such as purchasing, and the latter would raise serious privacy concerns.

In general, no measure can be perfect, but as a country tries to minimize the rate of false negatives of a solution--allowed actions that should be blocked--it will dramatically push up false positives--legitimate uses of the Internet that are blocked. Governments must accept that, as with any law, perfect enforcement of these laws will be impossible.

The Internet may cease to be global. Currently, nearly all sites are accessible in nearly all countries. If it becomes common for each country to have unique content regulations, we may see more and more sites that are inaccessible by a significant fraction of the world populace. There are many ways that this could occur. For example, if websites are given the burden of filtering objectionable content from visitors of every country, many may instead choose to reject users but from the home country and maybe a few additional countries that are either large enough to be worth the effort or permissive enough to require little effort.

User-generated content may face serious challenges. If websites are held responsible for all of their content with mistakes harshly punished (through any means--filtering, legal penalties, or others), it will become significantly more difficult to run websites that host user-generated content. Websites like Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook have exploded in usage and societal value over the past decade, and harsh penalties may strongly dampen their ability to continue. We can already see this in countries like China that block some of these sites.

Most possible schemes are prone to abuse. Transparency is key. Most systems that can be used to suppress true crimes can also be used to suppress speech that ought to be protected, such as political dissent, and many measures would also allow the government to invade citizens' privacy as well. These solutions should not necessarily be disregarded for this reason, but it is important to require transparency in the use of these measures to discourage governments from abusing these powers. One rare advantage of measures that mandate that websites tailor their content to the laws of the country of each visitor is that each country's rules would have to be completely public.

While proposing a comprehensive regulatory system that can satisfy all countries and preserve the web's character is far beyond the scope of this project, we have come to some conclusions about what will and will not work.

Attempts at solving these problems with a one-size-fits-all multinational treaty will fail. There is vast diversity in the amount that different governments wish to regulate the Internet, and nothing will change that in the near term. Any agreement would necessarily be too permissive for some and too restrictive for others. This would leave the countries in the more limiting countries with the exact same choices they had before for closing the gap between their desired level of regulation and the world's regulation. Thus, for these governments, it would do very little.

Furthermore, it would unnecessarily infringe on Internet freedom in the countries that wish for a more permissive Internet. It could lead actors in these countries to setup silo-ed networks that were not accessible by the regulated world Internet but in exchange had more freedom, which would be an unfortunate change to the global nature of the Internet.

Thus, we see that a monolithic global regulation for what can and cannot exist on the Internet will leave some countries with the same exact problem they had before and others with new problems. This is a heterogeneous problem that needs a heterogeneous solution.

Burdens on websites should be minimized. If governments wish to filter the Internet, they should bear the burden of implementation, just as customs inspections are their responsibility. This is a compelling recommendation not only because it prevents all websites from being bogged down by the complicated regulations of each and every country, but also because it means that the censoring government, rather than the website, would be at fault in the inevitable case that it comes to light that there are imperfections in the content classifying system.

Cyberlibertarianism should be rejected. While we have identified many potential problems with ill-conceived solutions to these problems, giving up on finding a good solution is not the answer. One can use the Internet to perpetrate legitimate harm, such as libel, sale of child pornography, and disseminating instructions for making weapons. Society has a real interest in fighting these harms, and if they are allowed to go free on the Internet, we will pay a high price. The Internet needs good, pragmatic regulation that walks the fine line between ineffectiveness on the one hand and hindering legitimate use of the Internet on the other. 

Furthermore, there is no question that governments will reject cyberlibertarianism. The Internet is quickly becoming central to every part of life, and as such, governments will increasingly feel a need to regulate the Internet to protect the interests of their society. If those who wish to see the Internet keep its free, global, and private character refuse to discuss pragmatic compromises and instead maintain that the only answer is the complete lack of regulation, this will not serve their purposes. Instead, it will simply allow special interests and uninformed government officials who value preventing harm on the Internet over cultivating the many very good uses of the Internet to dominate the conversation, leading to worse regulations. Instead, those who tend toward cyberlibertarianism should accept that it is an unrealistic ideal and instead seek to ensure that when governments inevitably choose to regulate, they craft good regulations that preserve as much of the freedom of the Internet as possible.

Lawrence Lessig makes this point in the closing pages of Code. Version 2.0: (20)