Nevertheless, the internet is here seen as a promoter of liberal democratic values, as it is for Christopher Kedzie. His chapter correlates electronic-mail connectivity and democracy across countries, thus apparently confirming Huntington's and Toffler's separate ideas about 'third waves'. Kedzie's frankness about the problem of defining the democratic and interconnectivity variables, and of ranking countries, is an appropriate caution. Important, too, are the reminder about the difference between correlation and causation, and his search for alternative explanatory variables. They note the growing pressure for strong cryptography from electronic commerce interests and from the information security industry, and the distorting effects of US policies for the export of encryption products.
Free speech is another issue in which the prospect for global regulation is uncertain.
Viktor Mayer-Schoanberger and Teree Foster conclude that the international nature of information infrastructures reveals the shortsightedness of both free speech absolutists and national regulators, and call for a binding international legal instrument limiting regulation to specific types of speech. In their chapter, Peter Weiss and Peter Backlund make a clear pitch on the ground of 'diversity' for US open access to government-held information, as against other governments' own commercialization of it. Their case study of meteorological information-sharing across countries illustrates the adverse consequences of this conflict of approach, but they look beyond this example for a resolution that embodies open access. This is a major issue in global information policy, and it is useful to have a strongly worded statement of the issues. Finally, a less satisfactory contribution is John Goldring's discussion of consumer protection which, in various places, is rambling, textbookish, and baldly or simplistically stated.