BROOKE GLADSTONE: So there seems to be three camps, when it comes to the question of governing the internet – no governance, governance by an international body, and governance by treaties among countries. John Palfrey is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. He says – it depends.

JOHN PALFREY: It depends on what issue, specifically, that you're worrying about. So spam would be one example where I think there are relatively consistent views about the fact that spam is an annoyance, but within each country there are different views about what constitutes free speech and how much regulation is appropriate in a zone like this. So with spam, for instance, I think there will be a number of different national laws, and there'll be coordination of enforcement by national governments, but also most of the decisions will be made by users – those of us who are using computers and making decisions about what we want to filter out, at a personal level.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But on a personal level, intellectual property becomes something of a sticky wicket. We know it was for Sealand. In fact, it almost sunk that project.

JOHN PALFREY: Intellectual property is one of those issues that I think belongs nowhere in the internet governance space. Every country that participates in some fashion in the global economy has intellectual property rules. The World Intellectual Property organization already has a structure for dealing with this problem. It's already a mess. And in some ways, the last thing we need is somebody else to get involved in intellectual property wars.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about privacy, as a specific issue for the world to agree on?

JOHN PALFREY: I honestly think the two hardest things to regulate in the internet space on a global basis are going to be civil liberties like privacy and speech, because the underlying principles are so specific to individual cultures. So, if you wanted to try to set some global rule around privacy, I don't think you're going to be able to do it. I don't think you'll get past the first base. Ditto for speech. I think we see this in the internet filtering context as well, where China and places like Iran and Saudi Arabia block lots of access to internet information of their citizens and block the ability to publish, whereas we don't do that so much in the United States. And whenever you get into this international negotiating context, things like privacy and speech, which bring up these very core values, tend to be the places where the discussion breaks down the fastest.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So it strikes me, then, that you think the internet simply is ungovernable on a global basis.

JOHN PALFREY: I don't think that at all. In fact, there is this whole strain of thinking from the mid-'90s that the internet is, by its nature, unregulable. I don't agree with that. The Lawrence Lessig school of thought in this space is that it's four things that govern the internet – it's laws of the sort that you're talking about – treaties and things passed by governments. But also it's markets – what companies end up doing. It's the technology itself – very importantly the code and the architecture – things that Google and Microsoft and others build. And lastly it's social norms that have huge effects – the kinds of things like peer to peer file sharing – the fact that many people, though they know it's wrong, still manage to violate copyright on a daily basis. And I think in internet space, it's the multiplicity of those factors governing at all times that's actually having the effect.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's pull out one of those strands you just summarized for us – that of the companies that seem to dominate the internet. A lot of these are multinationals. They aren't quite stateless organizations, but they sometimes act that way.

JOHN PALFREY: That's right. I think that the most important law on the internet is made by big American corporations of the sort like Google, Microsoft, Intel and by creating the computer code and setting the policies like Google's Adsense policy as to what constitutes an okay ad to run on their network – these are the most important and effective rules that are set on the internet, and they're not particularly regulated in the way that they do this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's flash forward about ten years. How do you expect the internet to be governed?

JOHN PALFREY: I think the internet will increasingly be governed through countries. I think that the geopolitical reality is that countries will realize that they can control parts of the internet, and they can coordinate their efforts to deal with the most important problems. But I think you also will continue to see a growth in the importance of the technology itself in terms of setting rules, and you'll also see that users will continue to fight back against these other assertions of control. I think if you look at the copyright wars, for instance, intellectual property, you see the tug of war between individuals who feel they should be able to do things that are different and more creative than what the laws permit, and the states and the companies that are trying to sell stuff. I think you'll continue to see this struggle, and I don't think it'll be resolved in ten years, honestly.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, John, thank you very much.

JOHN PALFREY: Thank you so much. It's been great to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Palfrey is the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.