Today’s methods for governing the internet do not constitute a coherent system, much less a democratic one.

Columnist Joe Mathews writes for Zócalo Public Square. (Courtesy Joe Mathews) 

Instead, internet governance is a contest for power between the most powerful tech companies, who put their shareholders first, and national governments, which prioritize their own political interests.

In this contest, both sides create the pretense of democracy. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has created its own “independent oversight” board of global experts, though it’s unelected and chosen by Facebook. The European Union touts its tougher regulation of privacy and the internet — but those regulators are also unelected, and impose their rules on people far from Europe.

Which is why the internet needs a democratic government that operates beyond the reach of tech companies or national government. Such a system must be both local — to allow people to govern the internet where they live — and transnational, just like the internet itself.

There is as yet no clearly articulated vision of such a government, but there are many constituent pieces that could be mixed together.

A Europe-based network of human rights organizations has developed a Charter of Digital Rights — Article 4, for example: “Every person has the right to freedom of speech and expression in the digital world” — that could be part of the constitution of an internet government. The NetMundial Initiative, developed in recent years with a strong push from the World Economic Forum and a previous Brazilian government, offers ideas for international governance of the internet built around a council that mixes rotating and permanent members.

There are lessons to be learned from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a somewhat democratic non-profit that successfully governed a narrow part of the internet — the domain name system — with participation from more than 110 countries from 1998 to 2016.

An effective internet government must be collective because the internet’s power, and commercial value, lies not in any individual user or data, but in the aggregation of users and data. In a must-read essay in Noema magazine, published by the California-based Berggruen Institute, Matt Prewitt, president of the RadicalxChange Foundation, suggested structuring internet governance not around individual data rights, but rather around a series of “data coalitions” — online unions that would give communities of users democratic authority.

“Data cannot be owned, but must be governed,” Prewitt wrote. “Data must be the subject of shared democratic decisions rather than individual, unilateral ones. This presents particular challenges for liberal legal orders that have typically centered on individual rights.”

In a similar vein, I’d suggest that the internet’s democratic government combine multiple forms of democratic governance.

The center of such a government should be a citizens’ assembly — a tool used around the world to get democratic verdicts that are independent of elites. This citizens’ assembly would consist of 1,000 people who, together, would be representative by age, gender and national origin of the global community of internet users. They would not be elected individually, but rather chosen via randomized processes that use sortition (or drawing lots).

The assembly would be supplemented by an online platform that allowed people to report problems, make suggestions, or even petition for proposals that could be voted upon in a global referendum by internet users everywhere. The models for such a platform include Rousseau, the controversial online environment through which Italy’s Five Star Movement governed itself for a time, and Decide Madrid, the online participatory framework that has spread from the Spanish capital to more than 100 cities worldwide.

National governments and tech companies would try desperately to influence this government, but they would not be in charge of it. And each citizens’ assembly would dissolve after two or three years — making it harder for the powerful to lobby it.

If such a government succeeded, it could offer a model for international democratic governance to address off-line global problems, from public health to climate change.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.