Attori, territorialità e «limiti» del cyberspazio (pp. 49-93)

ACTORS, TERRITORIALITY AND «LIMITS» OF CYBERSPACE - Cyberspace is a dimension of human life which is becoming every day more and more real and important, tangible. Internet, which is a large portion of today's cyberspace, consists of infrastructures and contents. Its extension is not homogeneous in real space, partly because it is not yet perceived as an essential public service (provided by the state, as is for water, electricity etc.): on the contrary, its «shape» is defined on the basis of a series of elements, linked to technology, economics, society and even geography (distance from optical fiber, population density etc.). The contents of the internet perform certain functions, and the form they take in a website reflects both the technological constraints and the culture of society in which they have been produced. In this way a lot of cyberlandscapes are created, where large web portals resemble «mcgalopolis» at the top of functional hierarchy of the network, linked by highways of hyperlinks and information flows and mapped by search engines, which play a dominant role in the description and the shaping of this space. Cyberspace is a social space also: it can be identified some cyberterritories where acting different powers and different sovereignty, from a forum administrator to the authority that rules over the toponyms of all web places (Internet addresses) and assigns the relative rights. Who has the sovereignty over this space? Which role have the old states? Which governance processes have been enabled? Who are the actors that matter? These are some of the questions this paper tries to confront with.