John Perry Barlow beschreibt den Stand der Bemühungen um eine „Unabhängigkeitserklärung für den Cyberspace“ nach 10 Jahren:
TEN YEARS AGO, WHEN hyperbole was the last word, John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was compared by many to Thomas Paine’s The Crisis, which signaled the beginning of the American Revolution. Writing for Wired magazine, Barlow heralded the rise of the digerati. In turn he was trumpeted by them for delivering the seminal pronouncement of the emergent digital age and for declaring war on any institution that would try to control the Internet. His manifesto has since been widely distributed, widely quoted, and is linked to more than 20,000 Internet sites. As a consequence, he has been called „the Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace.“ A decade later, as Cyberspace and Real Space have merged, California magazine asked him to reexamine his manifesto, assessing where he was right, where he was sort of right, and where he was overblown.