Pressure from business, lawyers and governments have made many commercial laws relatively uniform. For example, the Uniform Commercial Code and international trade agreements have significantly reduced unexpected surprise or arbitrary enforcement of unknown foreign laws. However, the Internet complicates this considerably. Methods of regulating activities become less effective as individual and commercial activity migrates from the physical world into Cyberspace. The rise of the Internet has catapulted the concept of jurisdiction into the limelight making jurisdiction a most central concept to maintaining law and order in Cyberspace.
Jurisdiction is a term used in several related senses.
Second, it is the power of a government or subdivision to regulate activities of particular citizens or businesses. The law of jurisdiction has been fairly well settled in recent years. However, the Internet may be changing this making it much more likely that the activities of persons outside one jurisdiction would fall within the regulatory powers of another jurisdiction , thereby permitting the exercise of court or regulatory jurisdiction to impact rights implicated by these activities. Jurisdiction generally exists over the citizens, businesses and other activities conducted within a political subdivision. The traditional concepts of jurisdiction must be reevaluated as the volume of interstate and international contacts grows on the Internet.