Opinion ID: 203652
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Internet

Text: The Internet is an international network of interconnected computers. Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 849, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 138 L.Ed.2d 874 (1997). Internet communication relies on TCP/IP, [2] a set of standard operating and transmission protocols that structure the Internet's operation. In re DoubleClick Privacy Litigation, 154 F.Supp.2d 497, 501 (S.D.N.Y.2001). Any message or file to be transmitted is broken into smaller pieces, called packets. Each packet contains the Internet Protocol (`IP') address of the destination ..., a small portion of data from the original document, and an indication of the data's place in the original document. Id. The packets are routed along the web-like network of interconnected computers. Not all packets from the same transmission necessarily follow the same path. Sightsound.com, Inc., 185 F.Supp.2d at 461. Along the way, computers called routers determine the shortest-in-time route for each packet from source to destination. Each packet therefore takes a stepping-stone path through the network of connected computers, subject to re-routing along the way if there is congestion, an outage, or any other error in any part of the path. At the destination computer, the packets are re-assembled according to instructions they contain into the original file or message. If any packets are missing, the destination computer may request they be resent from the source computer. DoubleClick Privacy Litigation, 154 F.Supp.2d at 502. All of this can now occur fast enough to enable a viewer to watch live video from the other side of the planet. Dynamic routing, as the process is known, makes the Internet extraordinarily robust, because the path between two computers is able to adapt to changing conditions on the network and thereby avoid areas of outage, congestion or other problems. Dynamic routing, however, also obscures the exact path a piece of data would likely take, or have taken, from one computer to another. For the purposes of determining whether a transmission has taken place across state lines, this difficulty is compounded because transmission along any single segment of wire or fiber-optic cable is so fast that the actual distance of the packet's journey is much less important in computing the total travel time than are network congestion, the number of hops the packet takes and other factors. Simply put, it is impossible to say with any certainty that a given packet will take the shortest route in distance; the routers search for the shortest route in time. Further compounding this problem, the network itself was not established with state boundaries in mind, nor does it even recognize them. The Internet is wholly insensitive to geographic distinctions. Am. Libraries Ass'n v. Pataki, 969 F.Supp. 160, 170 (S.D.N.Y.1997).