Legal/Technical Architectures of Cyberspace
Democratic Structures in Cyberspace
- Team Members
- Jennifer Chung
- Jason Linder
- Ian Liu
- Wendy Seltzer
- May Tse
- Executive summary by May Tse
- Oral presentation by Wendy Seltzer
As the Internet grows in importance to our everyday life, 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?
The Purpose for Democracy in 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.
Online Communities Which Self-Govern
It is first appropriate to examine online communities which have been
developing for years. Small communities formed from MUD's, MOO's, BBS's, and
Usenet groups resemble local neighborhoods where the citizens of the group
govern themselves by choosing their own rules and punishments. Yet these
communities differ from real space neighborhoods in the relative permanence
of their memberships. In a physical neighborhood, you must relocate to
escape the offensive acts of a neighbor, which is not always feasible.
In cyberspace, a few keystrokes will switch you from one online group to
another. The ease of entry and exit in online groups would appear to sap the
power from community norms. Yet many such communities persist. One
explanation is that in these small communities, it takes a longer time and
more effort to develop an online identity, and this investment is lost when
one leaves the community. Establishment of identity may give the user a
stake in a particular community, impelling him to attempt to resolve
differences with online neighbors rather than moving out. Are these online
communities the towns or states of the Internet? If so, what happens when
a person is involved in multiple online communities? When does a user's
identity in cyberspace begin to mirror that as in the real world?
Connecting Real Space Government with Cyberspace
The potential for online resolution of real space issues raises its
own questions. The Internet offers a powerful tool to connect individual
citizens with their government. Its information delivery could enhance
transparency, allowing individuals checks on the actions of representatives.
Alternatively, it could remove the intermediary and facilitate direct
many-to-many participation. The geographic motivation for representative
democracy is diminished, but the wealth of information and complexity of
decisions may increase. How does this change the face of representation?
If a direct democracy is more technically feasible, does that mean that
it should be attempted, or should representative democracy still be preserved?
How might real space governance be facilitated online? The CGI forms
already available through a simple web browser can replicate the voting
booth where yes/no answers are sought. We can streamline the process by
providing easy access to the voting profiles of political parties, and easy
hyperlinked access to their platforms and explanations.
Developing a New Architecture for Voting
Yet if we seek a more informed electorate, the deliberative polling
concept developed by James Fishkin offers some promise. In Fishkin's model,
a pool or sample of voters is given information on a topic and put into group
discussions on issues before voting. Online, a combination of hyperlinked
documents and media, and real time and asynchronous conversations can
simulate this experience. Can we provide the right incentives to encourage
informed deliberation? A type of proportional representation, more feasible
in cyberspace, in which individuals could add weight to their vote through
participation in areas of particular concern, offers one approach. If not
yet ready for the prime time of national government, such a protocol might
be appropriate for corporate stockholders or membership organizations.
In any online voting implementation scheme, the technological
architecture will raise issues. To enable anonymous voting, a form of digital
identity must be established to verify eligibility and to prevent a person
from casting multiple votes. Various encryption algorithms offer different
answers. For instance, a self-adjudicating protocol uses several layers of
encryption and computation to enable participants to vote without involving
a third party. Computation is reduced with a central vote repository, but
an independent third party must both administer and count the ballots. A
multiple voting organization structure distributes the control, relying on
two separate parties, one to administer and one to count the ballots.
Before scheduling an online vote with real space effects, however, one must
ensure universal Internet access to all potential voters.
Internet Governance of the Future
In the immediate future, the governance of the Internet itself raises
all these questions. The aforementioned small online communities cannot remain
disparate forever, and the time will come when the Internet as a whole needs
to have some form of a centralized government. The United States government
has provisionally granted that governance to ICANN, a non-profit California
corporation. As part of the agreement, however, ICANN has committed to
developing structures by which "members of the Internet community" can
contribute to and appeal to a neutral arbiter decisions that affect them.
Who is a "member," and by what mechanisms can this expansive "community" be
defined and brought together? Here, the Internet is both the question and
the tool by which it must be answered. In the coming months, it will depend
on the "members of the Internet community" to answer these fundamental
questions about themselves even as they construct the foundations for
practical decision-making. The technologies of online voting and deliberative
polling, combined with an understanding of the types of sub-community that
have already carved out their own spaces on the Internet gives them some
suggestions. In turn, we should take the construction of government for and
in cyberspace as an opportunity to reexamine democracy itself, and apply the
lessons and tools of Internet democracy to its real space counterpart.
Return to conference page
Send comments about this site to 6805-webmaster@martigny.ai.mit.edu.
Last modified: December 3 1998, 1:11 AM