Thus, for example, when a local governing body in Britain recently attempted to squelch an investigatory report highlighting abuses in its child welfare service, web sites outside Britain quickly made the report available in its entirety. Not only was the information thus archived beyond the reach of the British authorities, it remained easily accessible to anyone in Britain with access to the Internet. Despite the lack of centralized control, the Internet exhibits a remarkable degree of order. Without government coercion, millions of users have managed to adopt standardized protocols enabling the network to function. Social norms have arisen in a wide range of contexts, norms that are enforced by communities of users rather than a centralized police force.
New tools enhance such decentralized procedures.
Deja News, for example, allows users to review others' contributions across newsgroups, enabling individuals' reputations to be easily verified. Certification systems from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Better Business Bureau enable service providers to signal their reliability and trustworthiness. Even more important, traditional forms of economic regulation are rapidly becoming impossible in many industries. Indeed, the falling communications costs made possible by the Internet mean that businesses from retail banking to gambling can be effectively removed from regulators' jurisdiction. Widely available means of strong encryption provide individuals with a degree of privacy previously attainable only by government security services.