It is a controversial definition. Strom points out the need to build communities around Web sites. At architecture schools, students bemoan the loss to private interests of what once was public space, as happens when construction of a shopping mall shifts the focus of a town or village from the town square or main street to the enclosed spaces of the mall. Real public space, and not the pseudo, shopping mall variety. But the space that is created when those lines are humming with data, the cyberspace, has to be acknowledged as public space.
Public space is what it ought to be, and public space is what it is in practice.
The Net is, by definition, owned and controlled by its millions of users. No legislation is needed to accomplish this, thank you. Regulators need not apply. The public nature of the Internet is lodged irretrievably deep in its defining technologies. It is not to tell people how to live, or what to say or do.