National Rules Meet A System Without Borders

Societies legislate for territories, while the network was designed without any concept of where anything is.

Laws apply within territories. That is what makes them laws: a society decides how things shall be done within its own jurisdiction and provides means to enforce it. The network has no matching concept. Traffic follows arrangements between operators rather than lines on a map, services are provided from wherever the operator finds convenient, and the people using a service may be anywhere. The mismatch is structural rather than a bug anybody introduced, and it produces the recurring difficulty of applying territorial rules to something that does not organise itself territorially.

Both sides of this have serious arguments. A society that has decided, through its own legitimate processes, that certain things should or should not happen has a genuine claim to see those decisions apply to its own residents, and telling it that the network makes this awkward is not an answer to the claim. Equally, a network whose value comes from being interconnected and predictable is damaged if every jurisdiction imposes different requirements on the same infrastructure, and the parties who bear that damage include many who had no say in any of the decisions.

There is no tidy resolution on offer, and anyone who claims one is probably arguing for a side rather than describing the situation. What can be said is that the tension is permanent rather than transitional. It arises from the combination of a global technical system and a world organised into separate polities, and neither of those is going away. The practical work happens in the accommodations reached case by case, none of which fully satisfies either principle, and all of which represent somebody's compromise.