By Patricia Jacobus
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 19, 2001, 4:00 a.m. PT

The remarks were largely overlooked when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Communications Decency Act in a landmark ruling four years ago, but they seem increasingly prescient today.

"Until gateway technology is available throughout cyberspace, and it is not in 1997, a speaker cannot be reasonably assured that the speech he displays will reach only adults because it is impossible to confine speech to an 'adult zone,'" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in an opinion on behalf of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Nevertheless, she added: "The prospects for the eventual zoning of the Internet appear promising."

In the early days of the Web's popular explosion, this kind of zoned filtering was proposed repeatedly and often for concerns involving objectionable content or political rebellion. With few exceptions, the concept was abandoned as technically infeasible--especially as government officials worried that draconian restrictions might stifle an unprecedented Internet economic boom.

Today, however, the development of highly sophisticated filtering and tracking software is making such limitations possible for the first time. As a result, the new technologies are resurrecting a volatile issue long thought dead: the idea that the Internet can be regulated by geographic boundaries within the United States and from country to country.

"The risk is that if other countries are allowed to enforce regulations on the Web publishers all over the world, it would have a chilling effect on free speech and be a burden on the industry," said Alan Davidson with the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington lobbying group. "How will a Net business be able to comply to all national laws? Will businesses have to keep up with the laws in Southern Bavaria or in Saudi Arabia?"

Already, the use of new technologies to create de facto boundaries online is being tested in the much-publicized French ruling against Web portal Yahoo. A French court last year ordered the U.S.-based Internet giant to block those living in France from viewing Nazi memorabilia on its auction sites or face a fine of roughly $13,000 a day. Yahoo is fighting the case, arguing that France has no jurisdiction over an American company, but it has removed the items in the meantime.

The case raised fears among free-speech advocates around the world. If an online powerhouse like Yahoo can be held responsible for blocking certain visitors, the thinking goes, it could spell an end to the borderless universe that libertarians have long espoused for the Internet.

"I used to believe that the thought of government imposing their rules on an American Internet company was laughable, until I saw what Yahoo did," said John Perry Barlow, author and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If you're going to be free, you have to act free."

At the crux of the controversy is a new generation of software that makes it possible to block content and track people based on their physical locations. These tracking programs work much the same way as consumer profiling used by advertisers. They track a person's IP (Internet Protocol) address, which in turn can be used to locate where an individual lives or works.

Marie Alexander, chief executive of Quova, a company that provides geographic tracking through its GeoPoint software, said business has surged since the Yahoo case as other Internet companies worry that they, too, will be forced to block certain visitors.

"We have maps of the Internet, specifically by IP addresses," Alexander said in describing GeoPoint, which works like other tracking software. "It's like sending a letter and not putting a return address on it. From the postmark I can tell it was mailed in the Sacramento area."

The program was devised to help industries that do business across jurisdictional boundaries, such as insurance and pharmaceutical companies that must adhere to individual state laws as well as comply with federal regulations.

The software is also used for another type of law enforcement, known as "digital rights management." Record labels interested in releasing new music to a single country can use GeoPoint to block uninvited listeners.

That filtering ability carries wide potential for other copyright-sensitive industries, such as professional sports. Last year, many sports news Web sites were forbidden from covering the Olympics in Sydney partly because they could not guarantee that certain events would be shown only to certain spectators.

But such business uses can quickly become a double-edged sword. Although Yahoo's auction site argued that blocking sites along geographical lines was not feasible, Yahoo Sports Producer Tonya Antonucci pressed for ways to do just that for a chance at Webcasting future Olympic games.

Therein lies the heart of the debate: On the one hand, zoning the Internet could mean wider access as, for example, the music industry grows more comfortable releasing new works online or pharmaceutical companies consider offering medicine via the Web. On the other, such borders could inhibit a free exchange of ideas by providing a tool to limit Web usage that erects geographic borders online.

As tracking technologies mature, these agendas are likely to clash with rising frequency.

Mark Cramer, chief executive of tracking service NetGeo, describes these technologies as the Holy Grails for advertisers but acknowledges their unintended potential.

"The intent of our company is not to censor free speech," he said. "But it can certainly be used for that."

As it stands today,

Meta Group says strong forces are behind the development of geolocation services to identify and segregate consumers on the Internet. see commentary

Another problem is the inability to track people who use filters that conceal IP addresses along with such personal information as age, sex and income. Zero Knowledge Systems and Junkbusters, a privacy clearinghouse based in New Jersey, are among a plethora of organizations offering services and software that protect identities online.

Still, as with all software in demand, it is only a matter of time before tracking methods become more effective. And if legal pressures continue, it could become increasingly difficult to find places to hide in cyberspace.

For example, the 26 million or so people who use AOL Time Warner's America Online are registered in Virginia, where the company is based, so tracing an individual by IP address from outside its system would be no easy task. But if a court ordered AOL to block certain sites from its subscribers, the online service could probably do so far more easily and effectively than other Internet service providers.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is developing a technology known as IPv6 that would expand the IP address system and make people more easily identifiable by assigning serial numbers to each computer's network-connection hardware.

The technology has strong support among e-commerce companies that could theoretically acquire all manner of demographic information from potential customers, including income, professional credentials and citizenship status. That is exactly why it has drawn strong opposition from privacy groups and others who fear the prospect of a new Big Brother on a global scale.

Mark Brailov, spokesman for the American Electronics Association, acknowledges that the Internet cannot be free of government. But he takes a more tempered approach, saying that regulators need to be quietly present.

"The governments' role should serve as a guiding hand, not a heavy one," he said.

Yet some remain puzzled at what they see as artificial distinctions between cyberspace and the physical world. Like other Internet academics and professionals, University of Miami Law School Professor Michael Froomkin dismisses the notion of an unregulated medium as "cyberpunk dreams that rules are bad."

"Just because you're using a computer doesn't mean you don't have to follow the law," he said.