Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post Service, 5 January 2002

It is the modern-day equivalent of a border sentry. When visitors try to enter UKBetting.com, a computer program checks their identification to determine where they are logging in from. Most people are waved on through. Those from the United States, China, Italy and other countries where gambling laws are muddy, however, are flashed a sign in red letters that says "ACCESS DENIED" and are locked out of the Web site.

For much of its life, the Internet has been seen as a great democratizing force, a place where nobody needs know who or where you are. But that notion has begun to shift in recent months, as governments and private businesses increasingly try to draw boundaries around what used to be a borderless Internet to deal with legal, commercial and terrorist concerns. "It used to be that a person sitting in one place could get or send information anywhere in the world," said Jack Goldsmith, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago. "But now the Internet is starting to act more like real space, with all its limitations." These new barriers take many forms. One method is to simply restrict who has access to computers and gateways to the Internet. Another is to make all communications pass through filters that seek to weed out objectionable content, such as pornography or information deemed to endanger national security. Growing in popularity is software that attempts to match a computer's unique Internet address with a general geographic location, a technology that is becoming increasingly precise every day.

The debate is no longer about whether these barriers can be created, but whether or not they should be. Even those who support the idea in theory disagree on who should erect and maintain the electronic fences - nation-states or Web site operators. The new borders provide what some call a neat solution to the problem of how to resolve the often conflicting policies of the roughly 200 independent states of the world on matters such as gambling, commerce, copyright and speech. But critics fear that the barriers will create an Internet that is balkanized. And civil rights groups warn that freedom of speech will suffer, that the technology will make it easier for oppressive governments to stifle nonconformist viewpoints and that people's privacy will be eroded, especially because some technologies can pinpoint one's location down to the latitude and longitude.

"It's likely that the Internet of tomorrow will look radically different from different parts of the world," said Lee Tien, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

Already legislatures and court systems around the world have been attempting to assert their country's authority over the World Wide Web. Hong Kong's government, for instance, has been debating whether to pass a law that would make it a crime for any overseas gambling site to offer services to its residents. An Italian court in Genoa recently found the operator of a Web site in another country guilty of libel. A French judge has ordered Yahoo Inc. to stop selling Nazi paraphernalia because a law there bans such practices.

Without an international treaty or mediation organization, such rulings have so far been largely unenforceable on parties residing outside a country's borders. But that has not stopped countries from drafting rules for what is and is not permissible online.

At least 59 countries limit freedom of expression, according to Leonard Sussman, author of "Censor.gov." Singapore, for instance, works with Internet access providers to block any material that undermines public security, national defense, racial and religious harmony, and morals. That includes pornography and hate speech.

Some analysts say the barriers could grow with the development of "geolocation" technology, which attempts to match a person's location based on a computer's Internet address.

Quova Inc. of the United States, one of the leading providers of this technology, claims it can correctly identify a computer user's home country 98 percent of the time and the city about 85 percent of the time, but only if it is a large city. Independent studies have pegged the accuracy rate of such programs, which also are sold by companies such as InfoSplit Inc., Digital Envoy Inc., Netgeo Inc. and Akamai Technologies Inc., at 70 percent to 90 percent. The system is not foolproof; people can easily get past by using special software programs to cloak their identity. But experts such as Mr. Goldsmith, the Chicago law professor, say the technology need not work perfectly to have an impact. These barriers act like checkpoints on a country's physical border: They can be evaded, but most people probably will not want to go to all the trouble. Gambling sites were among the first to use the technology. When users from countries where online gambling is illegal try to get on, they are either not given the option to place bets or they are kicked out when they try to set up an account. "There are a number of sites out there that just don't care about the laws. They are perfectly happy to let U.S. gamblers in even though they know it's illegal," said Jeremy Thompson-Hill, an account manager for OrbisUK, a unit of NDS Group PLC of Britain, which provides the sentry technology used by Ladbrokes.com, Sports.com and other betting sites.

"But most reputable companies want to be able to say to the United States, 'We're taking every reasonable precaution to prevent the use of our gambling software in your country,'" he said.

The difficulty in recognizing nation-state borders on the Internet became such a concern during the 2000 Sydney Games that the International Olympic Committee effectively banned most Web video of the events.

Television stations had paid enormous fees for the rights to broadcast the games on a country-by-country basis - NBC, for instance, shelled out $3.5 billion for the United States - and they were worried that piracy or even legitimate online transmissions that were accessible to anyone, anywhere might devalue the worth of those contracts. The IOC and many of the owners of broadcast rights say that the accuracy rate for geolocation technology is still not good enough and that they will not allow any Webcasts for the Salt Lake City games in February. "There's no way to guarantee that your broadcast would be confined to your territory and would not run in to someone else's," said Kevin Monaghan, a vice president for NBC Sports.

Even if geolocation technology worked perfectly, some legal experts say it would not be feasible because it would require Web site operators to know the applicable laws in every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

"It would be incredibly burdensome to tailor content to meet all of the different laws in all of the different countries everywhere the world," said Alan Davidson, a lawyer with the Center for Technology and Democracy, a Washington research institute.