Cyberspace and the State Action Debate: The Cultural Value of Applying Constitutional Norms to "Private" Regulation

The "old" days of legal and cultural theory about online interaction are already behind us. Commentators can no longer speak confidently about cyberspace as an inherently unregulatable space, where sovereign governmental entities will be impotent and where newly empowered individuals will force the collapse of all kinds of cultural intermediaries and brokers, from political parties, to media conglomerates, to corporations. Instead, a "second generation" of thinking about the Net has emerged, less sanguine in its analysis of online regulation and more sober in its discussion of individual empowerment.