The quandary over what happens to the public network as national laws (and varying degrees of liberalism) are applied be it in the name or due to crisis is challenging. I don’t see how you can get countries to agree to a set of liberal ideals that large chunks of news, discourse and commerce have gone there. They won’t give so easily.

But things have been changing recently. Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, once said that national law had no place in cyberlaw. That view seems increasingly anachronistic. Across the world, nation-states have been responding to a series of crises on the internet (some real, some overstated) by asserting their authority and claiming various forms of digital sovereignty. A network that once seemed to effortlessly defy regulation is being relentlessly, and often ruthlessly, domesticated.

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It turns out that the way to deal with offline and online nationalism may be quite similar: Restore a sense of inclusiveness and fair play, flatten some of the sharpest inequalities and rediscover and stress the principles that made the network so inspiring (and radically creative) in the first place. As it happens, there is a tool kit, both existing and emerging, to do some of this.

Mr. Verhulst, from the GovLab at NYU, argues that laws and principles from a previous era should be updated for the 21st century, by applying telecom universal service obligations to broadband, for example, and diversity and equal-time rules (sometimes applied to radio and television) to large news and social-media networks. “It’s not like we don’t know how to go about this,” he says. “We just have to be more creative and think of what we can learn from models that were used in the past.” Competition law is another area that has received a lot of attention, specifically the need to update its provisions to take account of the (nominally) free business models practiced by many digital companies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rising-threat-of-digital-nationalism-11572620577