I just read Fred Benenson blog post "When Does Facebook Stop Being a Startup and Start Being A Government?" via HN (incidentally never come across Fred before but his blog is an excellent read, worth subscribing) and it set me thinking. The point he discusses is the line Facebook has to tread in terms of the rights and laws it recognizes - as he rightly points out there is no requirement for Facebook to follow the US bill of rights (unless it is explicitly enshrined in specific laws). They can, provided the TOS are right, remove whatever they like from the network.

How far does this go?

You see I'm thinking on a different tack - I think Fred is going down the path of "Facebook has the potential for too MUCH power" and that it should resign itself to the laws set out by real life governments:

These issues are about government, control, public spaces, and censorship, so our freedom and laws should apply accordingly.
I wonder though, are we missing a great opportunity here? Think of it like this; the Internet cares very little about country of origin. I have "friends" on Twitter from all sorts of far flung places on the globe. But their location barely matters (beyond an interest in their locale and cultures) because we communicate through an abstracted medium. So long as we speak roughly the same language we get along just fine.

Programmers know a lot about this idea of abstraction: take a complicated core library and put a layer on top to abstract and simplify it. That is the role the Internet is beginning to take in modern society. Even 15 years ago (imagining that I was the same age as I am now) I could not have "met" and befriended half the people that I have done - that includes people from my own country. And yet I do know them, they are part of a huge community of people sharing views, experiences and ideals together. Nowadays I can log on and communicate with potentially millions of people, with endless opportunities open to me. The net is, in essence, an abstraction of real life. For example, in places, communication and ideas are simplified down into 140 characters!

That is a country isn't it? Or rather it's a whole new world - within which we have hundreds (thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of different countries. The Independant republic of Twitter, the Principality of Facebook, the Dictatorship of MSDN (ok, lets not go there :P). When we talk about real life laws how much do they apply in this brave new world? More importantly why do the rules of any particular country apply (if we can disregard the geographical location of the website for a moment)  over any other? We are accessing the site from X country. So why do Y country laws apply? And why should Y laws apply anyway?

Application of "reality" laws get shaky on the Internet. Look at the mess of copyright infringement and pirating - the laws applicable to that are, in most countries, out of date and contradictory. In Sweden it is (or was, I suppose, now they have almost proven it's not the case) fine to facilitate the sharing of copyrighted material. So servers located there can do so with little worry of being stopped - where in the UK or US they would be layered under piles of litigation. What makes the distinction? Access is pretty much the same to either of the 3 physical locations; it is the country specific laws that allow things to go wrong. Old archaic "real world" laws are insufficient to govern the net - and this is just one tiny example to illustrate the point.

Why cant the Internet begin to reject geographical laws and start to develop it's own coherent legal and moral hierarchy? Many people have dual citizenship in physical countries - so why can we not ALL have dual-citizenship with the Internet as our second country? Self regulation is, I truely feel, a real option for us.

The advantage is that the net cares nothing about you: there are no immigration rules, no limits of where you may go and what you might see. Everyone regardless of age, gender, race, religion, sex etc. can make their  voice heard. If what you have to say resonates with no one it gets no traction. Those that do have sensible contributions to make earn respect and status: this is how it should be. It's already happens like that anyway; this is just a step further.

Now I know one potential argument is that extremism and hatred are also prevelant in this new "country". It's a sad fact of life that these idiotic ideas will always exist no matter how hard you work (and I mean in real life here) - indeed the ideals of the "community" pretty much allow them to exist by rejecting some ideas of censorship and control. But autonomy would almost definitely help to reduce such factions in a much more effective way that an any external governments can - if we had the ability to cross geographical bounds (or rather if that concept just no longer existed!) no one would have a haven for illegal material or hateful views (I know that is touching dangerous territory in terms of censorhsip; that, I think, is an important discussion for later in the process). There are plenty of other issues. But it is an idea right?

I honestly think this is where the internet will end up. And I think we have to sieze onto that now and make it happen the right way before the pirates and other big movers make it a haven for illegality. It's almost certainly an idea that current goverments will hate and attempt to block - but the net is far too distributed now for any one country (even the US) to kill it off completely. I also know it will be fraut with arguments, difficulties and obstacles - but hey, Rome wasn't built in a day!

How to do it? We are making the moves already - the Internet as a whole has a huge capacity for influcence that is growing daily. Large communities like Wikipedia already have some form of governance (in a really fucked up way, but still) laid out. Websites like Facebook and Twitter let us collaborate on a huge scale in real time. Google links everything together and would certainly be an important factor in glueing our ideas. Not that I am saying hand it to the corporates - that is almost definitely a bad, silly, move. But they have a lot of infrastructure we can utilise and if we make it in their interests to let us regulate ourselves (without pandering, obviously) then I dont see them standing in the way!

It could work. No, it WILL happen at some point in the future - I'd love to see us make the first moves today.

I hereby declare this new Rpublic of the Internet on behalf of the billions of inhabitants - long may it prosper!

dicuss :)