Internet democracy

Internet democracy can be used for several forms of participation related to internet:

• A derivative term for e-democracy (electronic democracy), especially related to projects and concepts centered on using the Internet.
• Self-regulation of the Internet, with the development of its constituent technologies through "rough consensus and running code," RFCs and expert boards.
• Participation of Internet users worldwide in non-governmental bodies that are setting Internet policy.

Democracy relies on votes and assumes every individual only votes at most once, so that the result may be considered correct and representative. Preventing people to vote more than once and hence falsify results of votes requires some kind of identification, which might easily be considered contradictory to the right of anonymity. Moreover, internet votes are easily influenced by hactivist groups, DNS filttering or even simple power outage. Having these facts in mind, internet democracy turns into an illusion. Taking into account that a large part of humanity still does not have any internet access, internet democracy today would even turn into an elitary democracy.

See also

• Democracy (varieties)
• eGovernment
• Electronic voting
• The party of Internet DEmocracy
• Emergent democracy
• Hacktivism
• ICANN
• IETF Working Group
• Internet activism
• Internet Governance Forum
• Netiquette
• Online consultation
• Radical transparency
• Request for Comments
• Second Superpower