A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - John Perry Barlow

Regulating Digital Technologies

• Governments have no moral right to rule cyberspace nor the methods of enforcement necessary to rule

• Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours.

• Calls the cyberspace “an act of nature”

• Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

• Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.

• Was created against the Telecommunications Reform Act in the United States