In his Toronto Star column this week lawyer Michael Geist reveals a real split of opinion on Internet governance issues.

Asians and Europeans aren't worried and figure they'll be even happier next year. North Americans are very worried, and feel things are going to get worse.

It's logical. The ITU-UN group that is seeking to assert control over Internet issues is based in Geneva, and has heavy representation from outside North America. ICANN may be a bunch of S.O.B.s, but North American executives figure at least they're ours.

There's also a divide on where the issue is, between business and the press.

Most in the press think the issues are in copyright. In fact, says Geist, "when companies were asked which jurisdictional issues posed the greatest concern, first on the list was actually litigation risk." Which goes to show you that if you want to scare a citizen get a cop, and if you want to scare a CEO get a lawyer.

His most frightening finding is what North American companies are doing to mitigate these perceived risks. Essentially they're cutting themselves off from the world.

North American companies are also more likely to attempt to identify the geographic location of their users or refrain from interacting with people in certain jurisdictions. Sixty-nine per cent of North American respondents indicated that they employed techniques to identify user location, compared with 41 per cent of Asian companies and 29 per cent of European companies.

Companies are increasingly refraining from interacting with certain "higher risk" jurisdictions citing fears of liability in the target jurisdiction, liability in the home jurisdiction, and user fraud as the primary reasons for doing so. They attempt to achieve this by employing technical measures to block access to their site or by establishing registration requirements. The use of geo-locational technologies, which purport to identify the location of Internet users, is still relatively rare.