No borders in cyberspace

In July, Quebec's Office de la langue francise (OLF) instructed a Montreal business to provide a French-language version of its web site, pursuant to regulations requiring all Quebec businesses to publish Frenchlanguage editions of their catalogues. Like Don Quixote some 400 years ago, the OLF is suffering from delusions: without realizing it, the organization is attacking windmills, mistaking them for enemy monsters.

There are no countries in cyberspace. There is simply a computer somewhere whose memory contains the web pages of a particular business. But this computer could as easily be in Warsaw as in Timbuktu, inside or outside Quebec's borders or even in a satellite 10,000 …