Netizenship

To put it mildly, the present state of the Internet needs work. While infrastructure and communications technology have advanced greatly since the Internet was first popularized, another equally important branch of knowledge, the administration and government of Internet communities, has barely changed since the dissolution of the First Network in 1990. This is the cause of much injustice, that most visibly manifests itself on the big websites, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but also reenacts itself on a daily basis in innumerable small forums and chat groups throughout the land.

"Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here," declaimed John Perry Barlow in his famous Cyberspace Declaration of Independence. Yet property is everything on the Internet. The actual rule in cyberspace is the Arkansas State Constitution: "The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction."

Power over a website is held, in the first instance, by its owner. However, property in websites cannot be owned indefinitely for free: website owners must expend resources to keep it online, otherwise it loses all value. So arise shareholders and advertisers, who gain the benefit of being associated with the website, whether by receiving a part of the profits in the case of the former, or by having its messages shown to the visitors in the case of the latter, in exchange for supporting it financially. When advertisers believe the increased income from site visitors following their ads exceeds the cost of advertising, they will advertise on a website. When the income from advertising exceeds the costs of hosting, a website owner makes a profit.

Can you see who's missing here? Why are people visiting the site in the first place? Because of what's on it! In most small websites, of course, the owner of the website and the creator of its content are one and the same. But that is far from the case for the giants. In most cases, the owners are "absentee landlords". They do not participate in their communities or contribute the content that make people visit the site, and neither do the advertisers that help keep the lights on. The people who create the content, which is what makes the site valuable, have precisely no say in how their site is run. The right of property is therefore used in many cases against exactly the same people that make it worth something.