Law is force of order. It reacts, usually with a necessary time delay, to technological progress. Only twelve years after Samuel Morse presented the first workable telegraph system in New York in 1838 and six years after the first completed telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, central European states agreed on an international framework for telegraphs. It has been much more than twelve years since the technologies underlying the internet’s popularity today, such as the ‘World Wide Web’, were invented. No international framework has emerged, even though normative approaches abound. There are norms that are applied to the internet, but the recognition of the existence of an underlying, structuring order is missing. This motivates the present study.
