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  1. II. INTERNAL/EXTERNAL PERSPECTIVES ON INTERNET ACCESSIBILITY: WEBSITECENTRISM VS. LAYER-CONSCIOUSNESS
    1. A. Title III’s Place- and Website-Centricity as an Internal Perspective
    2. B. Layer-Consciousness as an External Perspective

II. INTERNAL/EXTERNAL PERSPECTIVES ON INTERNET ACCESSIBILITY: WEBSITECENTRISM VS. LAYER-CONSCIOUSNESS

The metaphysical place-ness of websites, driven by the website-centricity of prevailing approaches to Title III, has emerged as perhaps the most critical question of the ADA’s applicability to the Internet. However, the question of place is not a novel one to Internet-law scholars, who routinely confront similar questions in a variety of bodies of law. Internet-law scholars have framed questions of the Internet’s place-ness in terms of internal and external perspectives.

In this Part, I begin by introducing the perspectives literature and explaining why the prevailing place- and website-centric approach to Title III is properly understood as an internal perspective—and why such a perspective is both doctrinally and normatively justified. I turn, however, to considering what an internal perspective on Internet accessibility leaves out—namely, a framework for addressing Internet accessibility beyond websites—and use the external perspective to flesh out a broader framework for addressing Internet accessibility with a broader conception of the Internet’s layered architecture.

A. Title III’s Place- and Website-Centricity as an Internal Perspective

As Tim Wu notes, “[l]egal thinkers, no strangers to metaphor, took immediately to the idea of Cyberspace as a place” when beginning to confront Internet-law problems in the late 1990s and early 2000s.73 Julie Cohen explains that, as a result, Internet-law scholars have engaged in a “full-blown debate about the merits of cyberspatial reasoning and rhetoric.”74

73. Timothy Wu, When Law & the Internet First Met, 3 GREEN BAG 2D 171, 171 (2000).

74. Julie E. Cohen, Cyberspace as/and Space, 107 COLUM. L. REV. 210, 211 (2007). Compare Dan Hunter, Cyberspace as Place and the Tragedy of the Digital Anticommons, 91 CALIF. L. REV. 439, 446–47 (2003) (“I think of cyberspace as a place. It may be virtual and abstract, but I conceive of it as a place nonetheless. Let me be bolder: though you may have never consciously thought about the proposition, you also conceive of cyberspace as a place. Let me go further and suggest that all legislators, judges, and lawyers unconsciously think that cyberspace is a place, even though at times they may argue vehemently that it is not.”), and Kevin Werbach, The Song Remains the Same: What Cyberlaw Might Teach the Next Internet Economy, 69 FLA. L. REV. 887, 945–46 (2017) (criticizing the dichotomy between virtual and physical interactions), with Mark A. Lemley, Place and Cyberspace, 91 CALIF. L. REV. 521, 523 (2003) (“As a technical matter, of course, the idea that the Internet is literally a place in which people travel is not only wrong but faintly ludicrous. No one is ‘in’ cyberspace. The Internet is merely a simple computer protocol, a piece of code that permits computer users to transmit data between their computers using existing communications networks.”), and Jacqueline D. Lipton,* Law of the Intermediated Information Exchange, 64 FLA. L. REV. 1337, 1342 (2012) (“[A]ll online conduct involves information exchange as opposed to physical contact”). *See also LAWRENCE LESSIG, CODE VERSION 2.0, at 83–119 (2006) (grappling broadly with questions of the nature of “cyberspace”); MOBILE TECHNOLOGY AND PLACE 3– 25 (Rowan Wilken & Gerard Goggin eds., 2012) (discussing the concept of place in the context of media studies).

Orin Kerr has framed questions of “whether we look to physical reality or virtual reality for guidance” as the problem of perspective. 75 These questions arise in the context of examples in computer crime and the Fourth Amendment,76 the governance of virtual worlds77 and virtual reality,78 the law of robotics,79 intellectual property law,80 privacy law,81 and even Internet taxation law.82

75. Orin S. Kerr, The Problem of Perspective in Internet Law, 91 GEO. L.J. 357, 357 (2003); see also Stephanie A. Gore, “A Rose by Any Other Name”: Judicial Use of Metaphors for New Technologies, 2003 U.ILL.J.L. TECH. & POL’Y 403, 416 (2003); Lyria Bennett Moses, Recurring Dilemmas: The Law’s Race to Keep up with Technological Change, 2007 U. ILL. J.L. TECH. & POL’Y 239, 255–56 (2007).

76. E.g., Orin S. Kerr, The Fourth Amendment and New Technologies: Constitutional Myths and the Case for Caution, 102 MICH. L. REV. 801, 875–76 (2004); Orin S. Kerr, Cybercrime’s Scope: Interpreting “Access” and “Authorization” in Computer Misuse Statutes, 78 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1596, 1619–20 (2003); Kerr, supra note 75, at 364–71; Deirdre K. Mulligan, Reasonable Expectations in Electronic Communications: A Critical Perspective on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 72 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1557, 1571–72 (2004); see also F. Gregory Lastowka & Dan Hunter, Virtual Crimes, 49 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 293, 296 (2005).

77. E.g., F. Gregory Lastowka & Dan Hunter, The Laws of the Virtual Worlds, 92 CALIF. L. REV. 1, 12 (2004); Nicolas Suzor, The Role of the Rule of Law in Virtual Communities, 25 BERKELEY TECH. L.J. 1817, 1842 (2010); Gilad Yadin, Virtual Reality Surveillance, 35 CARDOZO ARTS & ENT. L.J. 707, 732–38 (2017).

78. E.g., Mark A. Lemley & Eugene Volokh,* Law, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality, 166 U. PA. L. REV. 1051, 1080–81 (2018); Gilad Yadin, *Virtual Reality Exceptionalism, 20 VAND. J. ENT. & TECH. L. 839, 874 (2018); Gilad Yadin, Virtual Reality Intrusion, 53 WILLAMETTE L. REV. 63, 99 (2016).

79. E.g., Ryan Calo, Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw, 103 CALIF. L. REV. 513, 545 (2015).

80. E.g., Candidus Dougherty & Greg Lastowka, Virtual Trademarks, 24 SANTA CLARA COMPUTER & HIGH TECH. L.J. 749, 814–15 (2008).

81. E.g., Ryan Calo, Robots as Legal Metaphors, 30 HARV. J.L. & TECH. 209, 213–14 (2016); M. Ryan Calo, The Boundaries of Privacy Harm, 86 IND. L.J. 1131, 1161 (2011); Jonathon W. Penney, Privacy and the New Virtualism, 10 YALE J.L. & TECH. 194, 229–30 (2008).

82. Bryan T. Camp, The Play’s the Thing: A Theory of Taxing Virtual Worlds, 59 HASTINGS L.J. 1, 44 (2007).

Kerr’s critical insight, which has framed much of this debate, is to divide perspectives of the Internet into a dichotomy of* internal and external* perspectives.83 The internal perspective “adopts the point of view of a user who is logged on to the Internet and chooses to accept the virtual world of cyberspace as a legitimate construct,” while the external perspective “adopts the viewpoint of an outsider concerned with the functioning of the network in the physical world rather than the perceptions of a user.”84 From the internal perspective, “a computer connected to the Internet provides a window to a virtual world that is roughly analogous to the physical world of real space.”85 From the external perspective:

[T]he Internet is simply a network of computers located around the world and connected by wires and cables. The hardware sends, stores, and receives communications using a series of common protocols. Keyboards provide sources of input to the network, and monitors provide destinations for output. When the Internet runs properly, trillions of zeros and ones zip around the world, sending and receiving communications that the computers connected to the network can translate into commands, text, sound, and pictures.86

Kerr concludes that the choice between the internal and external perspectives is often outcome-determinative when we apply the law to a scenario on the Internet.87 That is, choosing to evaluate a situation from a user’s perspective may lead to different legal results than evaluating the same situation from a perspective that views the Internet literally in terms of its constituent computers, wires, and so forth.88

83. Kerr, supra note 75, at 359–60.

84. Id.

85. Id.

86. Id. at 360 (footnotes omitted).

87. Id. at 362.

88. See id.

While the debate has never been firmly resolved by Internet-law scholars, the prevailing approaches of disability advocates and scholars to Internet accessibility have a plainly internal perspective on the Internet. The reason for the embrace of the internal perspective by pro-accessibility advocates and scholars is driven in part by Title III doctrine, where, consistent with Kerr’s thesis, perspective is outcomedeterminative. Indeed, the sides of the circuit split on Title III website cases discussed in the previous Part fit neatly into the internal/external dichotomy. The cases where courts are willing to recognize standalone websites as places of public accommodation necessarily invoke an internal perspective, giving primacy to the user’s experience of the website as a metaphysical “place” subject to Title III’s requirements.89 Conversely, the cases that require a nexus between a website and a physical place to invoke Title III, as well as those cases that reject entirely the notion that a website can be subject to Title III, necessarily invoke an external perspective, giving primacy to the fact that a website is not literally a physical place and considering it under the law only to the extent it is directly tied to a physical place, or not at all.90

In this light, disability law advocates and scholars are justified in taking an internal, place-centric perspective at least because it has yielded positive results in cases involving standalone websites. That is, Title III’s scope—places of public accommodation—has created path determinacy, effectively requiring advocates to adopt an internal, place-centric perspective to win website accessibility cases.

Disability scholars also raise compelling normative reasons for adopting an internal, place-centric perspective on Internet accessibility. Areheart and Stein’s “right to live in the Internet” is inherently personal and focused on the lived experience of people with disabilities.91 How the Internet works, mechanically or physically speaking, is much less important than the fact that websites are an “indispensable part of day-to-day life in the modern world” through which a person conducts all their “[c]ore life activities such as commerce, education, employment, personal relationships, and recreation.”92 Blanck likewise argues that the application of the ADA to the Internet “[m]ore than any other means ever conceived . . . holds the promise to advance integrationalism and participation” and that, for people with disabilities, the “community enfranchisement [of Internet accessibility] constitutes tangible engagement and connection with others.”93 Ekstrand argues for conceiving the ADA in terms of the right of “people with disabilities [to] speak, gather, organize and know each other in virtual space.”94 And disability scholars have also identified good reasons to reject an external perspective on Internet accessibility—for example, Paul Jaeger argues for putting “more emphasis on human-focused arguments for accessibility” because “[l]egal and technical standards are too distant and inhuman to capture the very profound personal impacts of inaccessibility on people with disabilities.”95

89. See supra notes 42–44, 46–51 and accompanying text.

90. See supra notes 42–44, 46–51 and accompanying text.

91. Areheart & Stein, supra note 8, at 456–58.

92. Id. Of course, how the Internet works may be outcome determinative of its accessibility.

93. BLANCK, supra note 5, at 40–41.

94. Ekstrand, supra note 64, at 430–31.

95. Paul T. Jaeger, Disability, Human Rights, and Social Justice: The Ongoing Struggle for Online Accessibility and Equality, FIRST MONDAY (Sept. 7, 2015), https://uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6164/4898 [https://perma.cc/ 6ZN9-L3WL].

The doctrinal contours of Title III and normative importance of focusing specifically on the lived experience of people with disabilities understandably counsel toward adopting an internal perspective and rejecting an external one. In the context of advocating for Title III’s applicability to websites, an internal perspective may be truly mutually exclusive with an external one—that is, Title III effectively forces advocates and scholars to view Internet accessibility through an internal lens, or incur substantial risk of losing Title III website cases and undervaluing the rights of people with disabilities that are at the heart of the ADA.

Thus, I agree with disability law scholars and advocates about the doctrinal need to approach the application of Title III to the Internet through an internal perspective focused on websites—and the normative need to consider an internal perspective to Internet accessibility more generally. However, as I explain in the next Section, there are good reasons for pro-accessibility advocates and scholars to augment this internal perspective with an external one.

B. Layer-Consciousness as an External Perspective

As the previous Section describes, there are compelling reasons to maintain an internal perspective in promoting Internet accessibility and doctrinally considering Title III’s application to the Internet. However, some Internet-law scholars have rejected the need to choose between internal and external perspectives.96 Brett Frischmann, for example, argues that both internal and external perspectives are“descriptively valid and real” and “yield important insights about the facts of the Internet and the interests at stake.”97 Frischmann also argues that focusing on a single perspective risks “mask[ing] important policy decisions in the rhetoric of metaphor and factual analogy.”98 Jonathon Penney likewise urges a less hierarchical approach to perspective that focuses on internal concerns but is also willing to consider external concerns.99

In that spirit, it is worth acknowledging a key drawback of the place-centric internal perspective for Internet accessibility: it has focused much disability law jurisprudence and scholarship on the aspects of the Internet that are most readily amenable to the place metaphor—namely, websites. This is because websites can be colloquially understood even by non-tech-savvy judges and policymakers as “places” that an Internet user “visits.”100

96. E.g., Brett M. Frischmann, The Prospect of Reconciling Internet and Cyberspace, 35 LOY. U. CHI. L.J. 205 (2003); Penney, supra note 81. But see Cohen, supra note 74, at 226 (“[R]esistance to spatialization persists . . . largely because of misunderstandings about both the kind of spatiality that the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor expresses and the processes by which the metaphor operates.”).

97. Frischmann, supra note 96, at 207.

98. Id. at 208.

99. Penney, supra note 81, at 204.

100. See, e.g., Timothy Wu, Application-Centered Internet Analysis, 85 VA. L. REV. 1163, 1176 (1999) (discussing the conception that “a user actively ‘goes out and visits’ websites”).

But an external perspective reveals that the Internet is much more than a collection of websites. The goal of Internet accessibility embraced by disability scholars and arguably embodied in at least the spirit of the ADA, and perhaps its letter, is to make the entirety of the content, interactions, and functionality of the Internet—not just websites—accessible to and usable by people with disabilities. In this Section, then, I use an external perspective to illuminate several contexts in which Internet-enabled technology manifests outside the bounds of websites, turning in the next Part to the implications for Internet accessibility.

As early as 1999, before the Title III website battles had begun in earnest, Tim Wu critiqued the prevailing singular, web-centric conception of the Internet as “too small to capture the dramatic diversity” of the early Internet.101 The World Wide Web—the collection of websites that adhere to standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium—is only one application on the Internet, which, even in 1999, supported numerous others including e-mail, instant messaging and chat, remote administration of computers, file transfer, Usenet (a collection of discussion forums), MUDs (multiuser dungeons—early network-enabled multiplayer video games), and more.102 Today, Internet users can access a wide variety of Internetenabled applications, from streaming video and audio, to elaborate massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds, to real-time navigation, to voice and video communication, to electronic books, to virtual and augmented reality.

From an external perspective, just as the World Wide Web (and its constituent websites) is only one of the many applications enabled by the Internet, making websites accessible to people who rely on screen readers represents only one of the many challenges entailed in making the whole of the Internet accessible. While questions remain about the application of Title III to websites,103 a place-centric conceptualization of Title III that treats websites as places of public accommodation under the ADA leaves unanswered questions about making the whole range of Internet applications accessible—many of which might in turn be amenable to an internal, place-centric application of Title III. In this light, a framework capable of illuminating the constituent parts of the Internet in a more granular fashion isnecessary.

As a starting point, it is helpful to consider the wide variety of Internet-enabled applications available today. That proliferation is no accident, but a function of the deliberate, normative goal expressed in the “end-to-end” network design argument of Internet pioneers Jerome Saltzer, David Reed, and David Clark.104 The goal of the end-to-end principle, motivated in part by a desire to avoid AT&T’s iron-fisted control over the telephone system, was to leave application intelligence at the endpoints of a network, leaving to the network itself no more than the job of carrying application data from one point to another.105

101. Id. at 1163.

102. Id. at 1169.

103. See supra notes 47–61 and accompanying text.

104. See Wu, supra note 100, at 1164–65 (citing J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed & D. D. Clark,* End-to-End Arguments in System Design*, 2 ACM TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER SYSTEMS 277 (1984)).

105. See Saltzer et al., supra note 104.

As a result, the modern Internet uses a layered design where, in oversimplified terms, arbitrary applications can ride atop a set of common basic data transmission protocols (most famously, the Internet Protocol (IP)) which in turn, can be used to encapsulate data for transmission across any number of arbitrary, interconnected physical networks—whether coaxial cable networks, the copper telephone network, fiber-optic cable networks, or terrestrial or satellite wireless networks.106 In other words, the Internet Protocol, administered by Internet access service, backbone, and other providers, serves as a digital common language for any user on the Internet to use any application—whether sending an e-mail, requesting the contents of a website, or downloading a file—to communicate with any other user on the Internet, with both users having the flexibility to use any Internet access provider with the comfort of knowing that the “network of networks” will ultimately convey the communication from one endpoint to the other. This layered architecture has resulted in what Jonathan Zittrain has termed “generativity”—the Internet’s “capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.”107 These contributions materialize in the aforementioned proliferation of applications.108

Multiple generations of Internet-law scholars have advocated for addressing societal problems on the Internet with a nuanced understanding of this layered architecture.109 Though the full implications of the layered model (and the conception of the layers themselves) are hotly debated and beyond the scope of this Article, three insights are worth noting for the purposes of accessibility law: the principles of layer separation, minimizing layer crossing, and application-centered analysis.

106. See D. Waitzman, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, RFC EDITOR (Apr. 1, 1990), https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 [https://perma.cc/JG7W-WEG3] (explaining, tongue-in-cheek, how Internet Protocol packets can be transmitted by printing their contents on scrolls of paper secured to the legs of birds, then removed and scanned by a recipient).

107. JONATHAN ZITTRAIN, THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET—AND HOW TO STOP IT 70–71 (2007); see also James Grimmelmann & Paul Ohm, Dr. Generative Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPhone, 69 MD. L. REV. 910, 926 (2010) (noting the importance of generativity on computers connected to the Internet).

108. See ZITTRAIN, supra note 107, at 70–71.

109. See, e.g., DAVID POST, IN SEARCH OF JEFFERSON’S MOOSE: NOTES ON THE STATE OF CYBERSPACE (2009); BARBARA VAN SCHEWICK, INTERNET ARCHITECTURE AND INNOVATION (2010); ZITTRAIN, supra note 107; Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52 FED. COMM. L.J. 561, 561–63 (2000); John Blevins, The New Scarcity: A First Amendment Framework for Regulating Access to Digital Media Platforms, 79 TENN. L. REV. 353 (2012); Annemarie Bridy, Remediating Social Media: A Layer-Conscious Approach, 24 B.U. J. SCI. & TECH. L. 193 (2018); Susan P. Crawford, The Internet and the Project of Communications Law, 55 UCLA L. REV. 359 (2007); Mark A. Lemley & Lawrence Lessig, The End of End-toEnd: Preserving the Architecture of the Internet in the Broadband Era, 48 UCLA L. REV. 925 (2001); Lawrence Lessig, The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach, 113 HARV. L. REV. 501, 519 (1999); Lawrence B. Solum & Minn Chung, The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law, 79 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 815 (2004); Kevin Werbach, Breaking the Ice: Rethinking Telecommunications Law for the Digital Age, 4 J. ON TELECOMM. & HIGH TECH. L. 59 (2005); Kevin Werbach, A Layered Model for Internet Policy, 1 J. ON TELECOMM. & HIGH TECH. L. 37 (2002); Wu, supra note 100; Christopher S. Yoo, Protocol Layering and Internet Policy, 161 U. PA. L. REV. 1707 (2013).

First, as Larry Solum and Minn Chung have emphasized, the layered architecture of the Internet is not merely a description of the Internet, but a normative manifestation of the end-to-end principle—that is, the Internet not only is layered, but was designed to be and should remain so. 110 Second, as a result, Solum and Chung argue, regulatory regimes governing the Internet should, where possible, respect and maintain the layered architecture of the Internet by targeting regulations directly at the layers where problems occur—what Solum and Chung call the principle of layer separation.111 Where that is impossible, regulatory regimes should target regulations as proximately as possible to those problems—what Solum and Chung call the principle of minimizing layer crossing.112 As I explain in the next Part, these principles are important considerations for Internet accessibility because they counsel toward both ensuring a full accounting of accessibility problems across the full scope of the Internet and strive to ensure that people with disabilities can access Internet technologies of their own choosing on their own terms rather than being relegated to an isolated “accessible” subset of the Internet—though they are challenged by the economics of making applications and content accessible at scale.113

Third, Wu and others make clear that the panoply of Internet-enabled applications vary widely in terms of their social salience and attendant problems.114 As a result, different applications require different analytical frames and the problems those frames reveal require different interventions—what Wu terms “application-centered analysis.”115 As I explain in the next Part, accessibility issues manifest in significantly different ways across different applications that warrant different interventions.

110. Solum & Chung, supra note 109, at 849–51.

111. Id. at 851.

112. Id. at 852. However, some technical scholars have challenged the normative underpinnings of the Internet’s layered model and argued for affording system designers and engineers the ability to cross layers. E.g., Robert Braden, Ted Faber & Mark Handley, From Protocol Stack to Protocol Heap—Role-Based Architecture, 33 ACM SIGCOMM COMPUTER COMM. REV. 17, 17–22 (2003); Vikas Kawadia & P. R. Kumar, A Cautionary Perspective on Cross-Layer Design, 12 IEEE WIRELESS COMMS. 3 (2005), http://manet.eurecom.fr/kawadia .pdf [https://perma.cc/QJ4T-NY6S]; Robert Surton, Network Stacking Considered Harmful, PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACM INT’L CONFER. ON COMPUTING FRONTIERS (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2482767.2482780 [https://perma.cc/T5ZL-K4VG]; David L. Tennenhouse, Layered Multiplexing Considered Harmful, U. CAMBRIDGE: DIGITAL COMM. I (1989), https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0708/DigiCommI/tennenhouse1989layered.pdf [https://perma.cc/2REB-7TC4].

113. See infra Part. III

114. See Jack M. Balkin, The Path of Robotics Law, 6 CALIF. L. REV.CIRCUIT 45, 46 (2015) (“When we consider how a new technology affects law, our focus should not be on what is essential about the technology but on what features of social life the technology makes newly salient.”); Wu, supra note 100, at 1164.

115. Wu, supra note 100; see also Lessig, supra note 109, at 519.

The principles of layer separation, minimizing layer crossing, and applicationcentered analysis demand a more concrete account of the relevant layers. Though more specific models describe in detail how traffic flows over the Internet,116 Internet-law scholars have frequently invoked a simplified model with four distinct layers, visualized vertically and adjacently in a “stack” format (the “layer stack”), which are worth contemplating for the purpose of Internet accessibility:117

  1. The distinct content layer articulated by Yochai Benkler and others,118 which disentangles the individual pieces of content transmitted within each application—the individual websites (content) comprising the World Wide Web (application), the individual articles (content) comprising Wikipedia (application), the individual messages (content) sent via e-mail (application), the individual videos (content) served up via a streaming video service (application), and so on.

  2. The application layer emphasized by Wu, encapsulating the various applications that facilitate the delivery of content to and from users— streaming video, e-mail, instant messaging, VoIP, etc.—with which users interact.

  3. The network (protocol) layer, primarily encapsulating the Internet Protocol and related protocols that structure the underlying transmissions required to operate the applications, which are administered by Internet access service, backbone, and other network providers.

  4. The physical layer, encapsulating the various types of wired and wireless Internet access services, such as coaxial cable and cable modem technology, digital subscriber line (DSL) for copper telephone wires, and cellular telephone networks, which carry the signals logically described at the network layer and which are deployed and maintained by various types of Internet service providers. ** 116. More formal and complex layer models exist to describe the function of the Internet. One of the earliest and still most-recognized is the seven-layer model articulated by the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) subcommittee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which divides the Internet into application, presentation, session, transport, network, data link, and physical layers. Hubert Zimmermann, *OSI Reference Model—The ISO Model of Architecture for Open Systems Interconnection, COM-28 IEEE TRANSACTIONS COMMS. 425, 430 & fig. 13 (Apr. 1980), http://www.ce.uniroma2.it/~lopresti/Didattica/Biss2010/BasicInterntetTCPIP/OSI.pdf [https://perma.cc/UGE3-XV5F]; see also RACHELLE MILLER, SANS INST., THE OSI MODEL: AN OVERVIEW (2001), https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/standards/osi-model-overview-543 [https://perma.cc/KNP2-MX7W]. J. Pierre de Vries, Ljiljana Simić, Petri Mähönen, and Marina Petrova have proposed reconceptualizing the seven-layer OSI stack as a circle, and adding two additional layers—a “Layer Zero” that encompasses the regulatory regimes governing the implementation of the networking layers and a “Layer Eight” that encompasses businesses and social practices of entities on the network, which in turn inform the Layer Zero regulatory decisions. Ljiljana Simić, Petri Mähönen, Marina Petrova & J. Pierre de Vries, Illuminating the Road from Engineering and Policy to Radio Regulation (2012) (unpublished manuscript), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2031656 [https://perma.cc/R3HC-6XAK].

117. But see Werbach, supra note 109, at 59 (arguing for the importance of the logical and interface layers for policy).

118. Benkler, supra note 109, at 561–63.

Finally, I posit the important role of devices, such as desktop and laptop PCs, smartphones and tablets, speakers with embedded virtual assistants like Amazon’s Echo, wearable “smart” clothing, and more—typically referred to as the “Internet of Things.”119 Though generally considered adjacent to the Internet layer stack as a formal matter (and, from a computer organization perspective, often possessing a distinctively layered architecture themselves), Internet-enabled devices play a critical role in physically connecting their users to the Internet and enabling them to operate applications and engage with content.120

Important accessibility issues arise in and across each of these contexts, which I illustrate in the next Part.

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