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.