98. Cyberspace, as M. Ethan Katsh has written, is a "software world" where "code is the Law." M. Ethan Katsh, Software Worlds and the First Amendment: Virtual Doorkeepers in Cyberspace, UNIV. OF CHIC. LEGAL FORUM (forthcoming), quoting WILLIAM MITCHELL, CITY OF BITS (MIT Press, 1995).
"To a considerable extent, networks really are what software allows them to be. The Internet is not a network but a set of communications protocols. . . . [T]he Internet is software. Similarly, the World Wide Web is not anything tangible. It is client-server software that permits machines linked on a network to share and work with information on any of the connected machines."Id., at [7]. See also Post, supra note 50a, at par. 16 ("[N]etworks are not merely governed by substantive rules of conduct, they have no existence apart from such rules"). And software specifications can be unforgiving (as anyone who has tried to send an e-mail message to an incorrectly spelled network recipient can attest):Entry of messages into, and routing of messages across, digitally-based electronic networks . . . are controlled by more effective protocols [than generally govern non-electronic communications networks in the "real world"]: each network's technical specifications (typically embodied in software or switching mechanisms) constitute rules that precisely distinguish between compliant and non-compliant messages. This boundary [is not an] artificial construct because the rules are effectively self-enforcing. To put the matter simply, you can't 'almost' be on the Georgetown University LAN or America Online--you are either transmitting LAN or AOL-compliant messages or you are not."
Id., at par. 20 (emphasis added). Thus, individual network communities can be configured, by means of unique specifications of this kind, to bar all (or some specified portion of) inter-network traffic with relative ease.