You are a lawyer working with the International Court of Justice in The Hague in the Netherlands. You have been asked to review a recent decision regarding extraterritoriality.

The case: French survivors of the Holocaust sued Yahoo! U.S.A. because French citizens were purchasing Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo!'s U.S. Web site. The lawsuit also charged Yahoo! U.S.A. with hosting the Web sites of anti-Semitic groups. Although both these actions are illegal according to French law, they are permitted in the United States because of U.S. legislation protecting free speech. Because Yahoo!'s French Web site did not violate French law, the U.S. federal judge hearing the case threw it out.

The judge ruled that French law does not have the right to dictate the behavior of U.S. firms operating inside the United States. Today, the Internet sometimes makes it difficult to determine where jurisdictions begin and end.

If you had been the judge in this case, would you have ruled similarly?

List the factors you considered in arriving at your decision. Can you think of any Internet controls that could stop such cases from happening in the future?