In a recent bit on Internet censorship by Richard Waters and Joseph Menn in the Financial Times, the easy belief that “China is just being China” gave way to a more complex view of the relationship between national interest and a nation’s laws when it comes to new technology.  Here is how they put it:

“In popular consciousness, the Internet still promises a borderless world, a place where the free flow of information threatens artificial barriers erected by nation states. But the web is fast being carved up by national laws and regulations, whether aimed at suppressing opinion, tackling pornography or identity theft, as countries around the world learn the techniques of control. Far from being a universal medium, the world wide web is becoming balkanised – as users are now learning.”

Just ask David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, who along with two other executives, was found guilty in an Italian court for violating — on the Internet — that specific country’s privacy laws.

There are about 200 countries seeking to protect their borders, culture and economies.  At a time when the Internet (and complementary digital technologies) is shrinking the globe to the effective size of a marble, making those borders less meaningful, something will have to give.  It will not be easy or pretty.  And it will turn not on the rule of law or the size of a market, but on the will of the people who live there.

There was a time when the drinking age in New York was 18 and 21 in New Jersey.  The will of the Garden State’s oldest teenagers to test the limits of each state’s laws was abetted by a mile-and-a-half stretch of the approaches and span of the Goethals Bridge linking Elizabeth, New Jersey and Staten Island, New York.  That bridge, like the Internet, exposed unacceptable market differences.

It probably played a small role in triggering a debate that ultimately equalized the drinking age at 18 (the era’s military draft was a bit bigger reason).  But once the conversation began, other voices (and research) were drawn in.  They came to understand the value of a single age of consent but found social reason to raise it to 21.  It was a noisy debate, involving government and lobbyists, students and teachers, parents and social activists.  But it mostly involved people who saw how life needed to change because the world had gotten too small to accommodate certain differences.

The Internet will cause such change at a pace, width and depth we cannot now measure.  China will not be transformed tomorrow, but look at how different the country has become in the last 20 years.  It has gone from a boogeyman to a banker (and still a bit of a boogeyman).

But just like the Goethals, the Internet is a bridge that, once built, leads us to cross it.  And once crossed we are changed.