State Cyberspace Jurisdiction and Personal Cyberspace Jurisdiction

Cyberspace is an amorphous space that does not occupy a set physical or geographic location. Moreover, cyberspace is an electronic place and sovereignty and never before have we seen a space in which individuals, corporations, communities, governments and other entities can exist within and beyond the borders of the nation state in such an instantaneous, contemporaneous or ubiquitous manner1. What we call ‘cyberspace’ can be characterized as a multitude of individual, but interconnected, electronic communications networks. Cyberspace is already a global communications medium and the subject of valid international interest2. The Internet is not a physical object with a tangible existence, but is itself a set of network protocols that has been adopted by a large number of individual networks allowing the transfer of information among them. Additionally, the Internet is a medium through which a user in real space in one jurisdiction communicates with a user in real space in another jurisdiction. The world of cyberspace has no physical existence beyond the computers on which it resides but this fact does not keep it from being real because it is a world of information that have real consequences and a real existence. It is the interplay between the vast number of largely centralized individual networks and the decentralized Internet work through which they can communicate that will prove to be a fundamental importance in determining the efficacy with which state law can be imposed on individual network communities. Hence, the key feature of the Internet is that the net is set up to operate logically rather than geographically.