Community, Space and Online Censorship: Regulating Pornotopia

Internet censorship is a controversial topic – while the media periodically sounds alarms at the dangers of online life, the uncontrollable nature of the internet makes any kind of pervasive regulatory control impossible.

This book compares the Australian solution, a set of laws which have been criticized as being both draconian and ineffectual, to major regulatory systems in the UK and US and understanding what drives them. The 'impossibility' of internet regulation opens deeper issues – what do we mean by regulation and how do we judge the certainty and effectiveness of law? These questions lead to an exploration of the theories of legal geography which provide tools to understand and evaluate regulatory practices.

Key features:

• A comparison of Australian and US/UK censorship law;
• An exploration of legal geography to understand the special issues of internet regulation, specifically content censorship;
• Application of contemporary theory on censorship and morality laws to the internet context;
• A consolidation of regulatory theories of power, space and network to understand what the concept of 'community' means for regulators and how it is applied in the field of censorship.

The book will be a valuable guide for academics, students, and policy makers working in media and censorship law, those from a civil liberties interest and people interested in internet theory generally.