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INTRODUCTION
The courts' early attempts to grapple with the jurisdictional implications of the Internet were met with widespread academic despair. The technology seemed to defy the sense that governmental authority could continue to be territorially allocated. Common Internet activities like hosting a web page, participating in an eBay auction, or posting to an electronic discussion had potentially global impact even if the actors perceived their behavior as essentially local. The technology, seemingly overnight, transformed all of us into global actors, potentially subject to the jurisdictional and regulatory authority of many governments. Numerous commentators asserted that existing jurisdictional doctrine was not up to the challenge of sorting it all out.1
My position is that the Internet does not pose unique jurisdictional challenges.2 People have been inflicting injury on each other from afar for a long time. Although the Internet may have increased the quantity of these occurrences, it has not created problems that are qualitatively more difficult.3 Recent decisions have borne out my sense that courts would eventually work through the technological befuddlement evident in some early cases and develop a more or less consistent and predictable body of law.4
The confusion over Internet-based jurisdiction is, in large measure, attributable to some fundamental mistakes that both courts and commentators have made in conceptualizing the nature of due process constraints on jurisdiction. In particular, the relationship between the individual liberty interest asserted by defendants and the broader regulatory interest of states has engendered a great deal of confusion.
If, as the Supreme Court has sometimes implied, states derive their authority to act coercively from some form of a defendant's consent (a common account of the "purposeful availment" requirement of World-Wide Volkswagen5), the unintended extraterritorial consequences of Internet conduct seem beyond the remedial authority of affected states. From this perspective, due process does not afford states enough jurisdictional authority.6
Conversely, if due process permits a state to assert its authority whenever it acts to remedy the domestic consequences of harmful extraterritorial conduct (a broad reading of the "effects" test of Calder v. Jones), Internet users are vulnerable to assertions of authority by numerous states with tenuous connections to defendants' underlying conduct. From this perspective, due process permits too much jurisdiction and threatens to inhibit the operation of...