Lind treats countries and legal jurisdictions as "real," but says "there is no such place as cyberspace." It's a specious argument. A space is not the same as a place. I don't think mathematicians confuse the spaces they talk about with places. Geographer Manuel Castells, in his influential book series The Information Age, wrote about the conflict between "space of flows" - of networked finance, data and communication - and contrasted it with the "space of places" - physical locations where people live.
To be fair, Lind seems to be arguing tha cyberspace is not like a physical territory. The metaphor of cyberspace, by implying that it is, supports misleading conclusions. This is a reasonable argument. Metaphors are useful for description, but they are not predictive - though many people, journalists among them, take them too far. Lind is right that governments already have jursidiction over people acting on the Internet, though as others Slashdot commenters point out the Internet has raised numerous jurisdictional questions. However, we could not name or understand anything new if we did not compare it with something already known. I don't think the imperfection of a metaphor is sufficient grounds for discarding it.
But the motivation of the argument, it seems to me, is political. He writes: "it makes no sense to say that California and the U.S. are extending their jurisdiction 'into' cyberspace . . . The idea that corporations are 'invading' a mythical Oz-like kingdom called cyberspace is . . . dopey." I don't know about that. Scholars often use the language of colonization in cases like this. We could talk about government "invasion" into private or family space. Canada's then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau used a spatial metaphor when he said in 1967, upon the introduction of a bill to decriminalize homosexuality, "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."
. . . try substituting “fax” or “telephone” or “telegraph” for “cyber” in words and sentences. The results will be comical. “Activists denounced government criminal surveillance policies for colonizing Fax Space.” “Should Telephone Space be commercialized?” . . . the point is not that telecommunications should not be structured and governed in the public interest, but rather that the debate about the public interest is not well served by the Land of Oz metaphor.
He takes it for granted that these comparisons are reasonable. I don't think they are. I don't hear anyone talking about a "fax" community or a "telephone" community. But people do talk about an "Internet community," an "Internet generation" (more questionable in my mind) - even of belonging to an online "tribe". The Aaron Swartz memorial site is full of such statements. Note also the big-I: the Internet is a proper noun (even he spells it that way).
Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities about the formation of new nations, such as Indonesia, following decolonization. He explains how arbitrary colonial lines drawn on a map gave rise to real feelings of national identity among people who did not know each other: but who had a sense that they had shared histories and experiences. I think the Internet has produced some similar feelings. I don't think Lind's argument is entirely clear, but it seems to me this is what he is really arguing against. But that's a judgment of what should be. Disguising it as an objective description of the Internet is problematic.
Or hey, just read China Mieville's The City and the City.