Democratic Structures in Cyberspace
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- I.Executive Summary
- The Study of Democracy in Cyberspace
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Democratic Structures in Cyberspace 6.805-10 Jennifer Chung Jason Linder Ian Liu
Wendy Seltzer May Tse
Democratic Structures in Cyberspace 6.805-10
I. Executive Summary iii 1. The Study of Democracy in Cyberspace iii 2. Online Communities That Self-Govern iv 3. Connecting Real Space Government with Cyberspace v 4. Developing a New Architecture for Voting v 5. Internet Governance of the Future vi II. Introduction 1 A. Overview 1 2. Architecture 1 1. Flexibility and Ends 1 2. Challenge and Critique 3 3. Democracy 10 1. Democracy Defined 10 2. Democracy’s Discontents 13 4. Responses 16 1. Criteria 16 2. Deliberative Polling 18 5. Deliberative Polling in Cyberspace 19 6. Caveats 22 1. Universal Service 22 2. Limitations 24
A. Introduction 25 2. Usenet 28 1. History of Usenet 28 2. Social Norms as a Means of Governance 31 3. The End of Democracy? 34 4. Usenet II 36 5. Short Analysis of the Hierarchical Newsgroup Creation Structures 38 3. MUDs, MOOs, and Other Rural Connotatives 39 4. Case Study: LambdaMOO 41 1. The Democratic Dream 41 2. The Empire Strikes Back 43 IV. Governance of the Internet 45 A. Introduction 45 2. Internet architecture - a 'democratic' protocol 45 3. The Rise of DNS 46 4. Interconnectedness of networks – The Market and the Internet 48 5. Universal service of the Internet - 'The last mile' 50 6. Domain Name Policy - Internet Governance 52 1. Current Governing Institutions and Social Norms 52 2. Open standards 55 7. A case study: Domain Name Reform 56 1. Background 56 2. Evolution in governance structure 58 3. POC/CORE governance structure 59 4. Voluntary multilateralism 60 5. POC/CORE Representation 62 6. The US NTIA proposal - Green Paper 63 7. The Structure of the NTIA Proposal 65 8. Representation under the NTIA Proposal 66 9. Reactions to the Green Paper 67 10. A step forward - the White Paper 70 11. The ICANN board 71 12. International Representation 71 13. Representation structure of the two proposals 72
A. Introduction 74 2. Current Online Voting Architectures 74 3. The Deliberative Poll Goes Online 75 1. The Deliberative Poll Experiment 77 4. Some Further Possible Architectures 80 5. Feasibility Issues 82
A. Introduction 85 B. ICANN 86 C. Technology of democracy on the Internet 87 D. Theory: Membership and Representation 90 1. The problem of scale 90 2. Membership and Citizenship 92 E. Real World Meets the Net: ICANN as a Test of Both 93 1. ICANN Representation 93 2. Theory of the Deliberative Poll 95 3. Technology of the Poll 97
I.Executive SummaryAs the Internet grows in importance in our everyday lives, the line between cyberspace and real space begins to blur. The prevalence of email communications and the rise of electronic commerce are only the first of the opportunities the Internet offers. Along with its potential for social and economic interactions, the Internet raises questions about governance. It offers a new forum for debate and discussion about real world politics and calls upon us to understand and now redefine the Net's own governing structures. The Internet gives us new lenses and new tools for the study of democracy itself. Cyberspace is still in its formative stages. Now is the time that we must ask who will be given the authority to shape it, and how. Thus far, it has been characterized as a whole by benevolent oligarchy. The Internet's structure has been developed and controlled by the United States government, the various engineering groups who created and standardized its protocols, and more recently by other governments and corporate entities. That form of governance no longer seems appropriate -- the oligarchs no longer want the role, and their subjects want a say in the network's direction. On the small scale, by contrast, the Internet appears anarchic. Small groups have "colonized" portions of the network's frontier and made their own governance choices: from democracy (newsgroups, perhaps) to dictatorship (some moderated lists and online services). In the still-evolving network infrastructure, is there a non-geographic federalism appropriate to cyberspace?
Studying democratic structures in cyberspace recalls us to first principles -- democracy is a particular structure for law-making and governance, characterized by the sovereignty of the governed. Ideally, the structure guarantees equality, participation, deliberation, protection of minority rights, and transparency of decision-making and administration. Cyberspace, with its new architectures of interaction and new ways of forming communities, allows us to think about these democratic values apart from their traditional grounding in geographic jurisdictions. It offers us the chance to build off "communities of choice," the newsgroups and listservs of users with proximate interests, rather than locations. It allows convenient and powerful information access. The possible multiplication, division, or concealment of identity raises its own questions about the meaning and basis of citizenship. The Internet offers a sphere in which to recreate and rethink democracy; it gives us an opportunity to design new technological architectures to help reshape social norms.
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