THIS was John Perry Barlow’s suggestion to Iceland in 2008 at a conference for the Icelandic Digital Freedoms Society. Mr Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tends to get invited to conferences like this. He ran a cattle ranch, once, wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and does strange, fun things like suggest to a small island country that it reinvent itself as a haven for digital freedom.
The quote comes from Smári McCarthy, who invited Mr Barlow to Iceland two years ago and has been working seriously since late 2009 to turn that strange, fun idea—now called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI)—into law. Last night Iceland’s parliament voted unanimously to support the IMMI, which pulls together press and whistle-blower protections from several different countries; two weeks ago, Mr McCarthy listed them for us in an interview.
Source: Iceland’s media law: “The Switzerland of bits” | The Economist