No one wins when the law looks like an ass. Like an overrun teacher whose barely audible “Silence!” is drowned out by a cacophonous class, British law is currently prohibiting the publication of names that everyone knows.

The High Court order prohibiting the naming of a minor royal involved in an alleged sex-and-drugs blackmail plot is effectively useless because the name is only two seconds away from anyone with access to the internet and possessing the search skills of most British children. Similarly, the alleged killer of the murdered schoolboy Rhys Jones has been named on the website YouTube, although police have been attempting to get the name removed.

The current stance of English law, prohibiting the publication of information that anyone can access, is unsustainable. To command respect, the law needs to enjoy the confidence of the public. The law must not look daft. It thrives or wilts according to its acceptance by the public.

The standards that UK law wants to impose are, in fact, very sensible and for the public good. If a law court wants to prevent the victim of an alleged blackmail plot from becoming public (and remember, blackmail is a serious crime) that is a mark of a civilised society. If, to ensure a killer gets convicted following a fair trial, the law wants to stop prejudicial material about him from being aired in public, again that is a sensible rule. It’s not a convincing and rational answer for us to say “yes, but the whole world has lurched into an informational free-for-all now, so let’s just slide down this spiral into chaos with the rest of the world”.

Technological change in communication has been rapid in recent history. In 1984 there were 1,000 computers linked to the internet. In 2001 there were 150 million computers connected to the system. Today, more than 1.1 billion of the world's estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of them are accessing the internet on high-speed lines. Law formulated for earlier times sits like dust on the new webworld. It is making creaking changes but in an ad hoc non-strategic way.

Consider the rules in defamation law. This law was framed to enable the law courts to control what was put out in print and through the airwaves by just a few organisations. But now it’s no longer possible to rely on courts being able to use orders to control the publication of books and magazines, or TV and radio broadcasts. Material can be all over the planet before a judge puts his on his wig.

The internet enables a statement to be universally accessed far away from the point where it was uploaded. In the words of a judge in an Australian High Court case in 2002, information becomes instantly "available to all and sundry without any geographic restriction”. That court ruled that a man in Australia could sue a company alleged to have defamed him by uploading material on to the web from America.

The history of law shows that it has adapted before to enormous social changes. The ploughshare gives rise to one set of social relations, and the law needed to govern them, while the factory generated another set of social relations, and another swathe of laws. The internet age will need to develop a new set of laws to reflect global village life. That will be an acute challenge because different cultures have fundamentally different ideas about such things as freedom of expression, fair trials and the protection of reputation. But democratic control and policing of the internet according to a set of agreed international laws will be no more challenging than many things we already do every day such as international trade.

The author is Professor of Law, Director of the Centre for Law, at the Open University

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