The Law of Global Digitality

According to German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, it took some 200 years until the disruptive potential of the printing press started to influence all segments of society, eventually leading to a fundamental change in the structure of Western European societies from a feudal-hierarchical to a modern, functionally differenti- ated society.1 If this observation is correct, and global digital communication via the internet has a disruptive potential similar to that of the printing press,2 then we are in a relatively early stage of the socio-economic transformations triggered by this new communication technology. The control of U.S. public authorities regarding the infrastructural backbone of the internet did not officially end until 30 April 1995.3 The mid-1990s also mark the beginning of the widespread public use of the World Wide Web in the U.S.4 In 1994, AOL linked to the internet for the first time, Yahoo! was established and Amazon began operations as an online bookstore. Prior to the mid-1990s, the internet had also not had a significant impact on the law. Even in the U.S., internet-related legal disputes remained rare until 1995. This is even more true for Germany, where an article was published in the most widely read legal journal in late 1995, titled: "The Internet for Lawyers-An Introduction".?