THE GLOCAL NET: STANDING ON JOEL REIDENBERG’S SHOULDERS

Information technology and digital networks are global, and information can easily cross borders. Laws, however, are territorial, local, and specific. This is the meeting of the global and the local. Imposing local laws on global technology can result in a conflict, but it may give birth to a new condition, the “glocal net”: the fusion of the global and the local. Under the condition of the glocal net, as a matter of practice, people experience the internet differently in different places around the globe. As an ideal, the glocal net would strive to enable both the global and the local dimensions, integrated or side-by-side. This essay is a tribute to Professor Joel Reidenberg and his scholarship. I revisit the first generation of cyberlaw studies with an emphasis on Reidenberg’s work on internet jurisdiction; the discussion revisits the Yahoo! France case and juxtaposes it with a recent decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union, Google v. CNIL, on the scope of a right-to-be-forgotten order examining whether it should be local, European, or global.