Eric Goldman doesn’t like exceptionalism. He’s against search engine exceptionalism, virtual world exceptionalism, and now domain name exceptionalism. In each case, he situates a potential law to regulate some kind of online activity against a hands-off legal attitude toward the Internet in general. It’s a clever rhetorical move for the libertarian Goldman; it allows him to argue that any law he doesn’t like is a form of “exceptionalism” and hence bad.
I’m with him on his point that DNS-specific legislation has proliferated to the point where it’s just plain silly, but I’m not sure it’s a great thing for him that I’m starting to think of him as Exceptionalism Guy. If he keeps up with this pattern, when he writes a paper that’s not about exceptionalism, will people object that the paper is a kind of exceptionalism within his scholarship?