No man is an island, entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main - John Donne (1624)

AUSTRALIA MAY FIND itself isolated from the rest of the world if a Melbourne businessman unhappy with Barron's, a U.S. financial publication, wins his defamation case against the weekly Dow Jones newspaper in an Australian court.

The offending publication was a story downloaded from the Dow Jones Web site in New Jersey. So why would someone sue in Australia instead of the United States?

"Australian libel law" is a misnomer because the law varies from state to state, and an Australian may sue wherever the article is read or received. Aware that their newspapers might be carried onto an airplane in Sydney and read in Perth on the other side of the continent, Australian editors tend to be cautious. It's not how a story will be read just by the local audience, but by any audience.

In the United States, the case is roughly reversed, a situation that arose from the U.S. Supreme Court's 1964 decision in New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan in which the court adopted what it called a "federal standard" known as actual malice to protect criticism of public officials. That decision was later extended to protect criticism of public figures, not just government officials.

So when the Melbourne businessman decided to sue, he chose the friendliest venue he could - not the place of publication, which is what usually happens in the United States, but the city where the story was downloaded.

Dow Jones asked a Melbourne judge to require the plaintiff to sue in New Jersey, but the judge said no. Last week, Dow Jones lost an appeal in the High Court, the equivalent of our Supreme Court.

This has raised concern among publishers and editors here and in Australia. Generally, they are concerned that they will be forced to edit with the lowest common denominator in mind. Especially in the United States, that timidity may override the free and robust debate we're accustomed to. Already Dow Jones is being cautious. The Wall Street Journal, also owned by Dow Jones, in reporting on the High Court's decision, never said what offended the Melbourne businessman.

Dow Jones argued before the High Court that allowing someone to sue where he felt his reputation had been soiled rather than in the place of publication would result in venue shopping.

While not ruling on the merits of the businessman's defamation case, the High Court rejected that argument, saying that people will sue only where they have a real reputation to defend (that is, where they live) and only where the offending publication has assets. In other words, they will sue only where they have a chance of collecting a judgment.

But another distasteful outcome is possible: Australians may be kept from accessing U.S. Web sites.

Why should some court in Melbourne or London or Toronto decide what U.S. residents may read just because it's on a Web site within the United States? Why deny U.S. citizens the right of global Internet activity because some Melbourne businessman had a snit over a story in Barron's Online? It might be a pain to implement, but it can be done: U.S. Web sites can install filters that would keep out anyone coming in from Australia, holding Australians in intellectual isolation.

Donne would not agree, of course. "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind," he wrote. But if Australia's High Court does not understand that its ruling is the equivalent of a death, we in the United States may have no choice but to filter out countries that do not favor free speech if we want ours to survive.

R. Thomas Berner, a professor of journalism and American studies at Penn State University, has been an expert witness in several defamation cases in the United States and has written about the state of Australian defamation laws for an academic journal.