Whenever I open firefox, I get a small panel of suggested stories in the load screen. Today, I saw this one:

[The internet can’t handle functioning like a democracy](https://qz.com/1422925/the-public-internet-was-almost-a-democracy/)

And the title was interesting enough to have a look.

It turns out the column is about ICANN and how it held elections for board members back in 1999. It turns out even then several things were apparent: 

- People don't understand the theoretical differences between democracies and republics.
- The snobbishness of the in-group is nothing new
- The concept of identity politics had already been firmly established

Looking at the last point first, we have this:

> Turnout for registration was sizable by 1999 standards, when only 26% of Americans had the internet (pdf) in their home. More than 158,000 people around the world registered to vote.

> But the representation of that turnout was less stellar; only 4% were women, and 69% of the internet users that signed up to be at-large members were from the US. African internet users accounted for just 1% of at-large members, while European voters made up 20% of the final tally.

Yes, totally shocking that internet users who would be interested in ICANN proceedings in 1999 were predominantly men from the US with another sizable portion from Europe. But the assumptions that go into those concerns are that representatives can't understand or empathize with issues facing other people. This is the baseline assumption that everyone in the identity movements makes. It's me against you, no matter what.

Of course, even if the elections had counted for something, they wouldn't really:

> “I am concerned about capture [of votes] by people who don’t know what they are doing,” Dyson said, according to the New York Times. “People who are stupid, individually.”

and

> A nomination board appointed by ICANN eventually selected 27 nominees to represent five geographic areas around the world: Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, and North America. Of the 158,000 registered voters, only 34,000 actually cast their ballots, narrowing the candidates to five, who were later appointed to board seats alongside 14 other board members.

> Elections were not held again.

So they scrapped everyone's votes because they didn't like the results and ended up choosing 5 people to sit on the board out of 19. In other words, even if the votes had been successful they would only have served as tie-breakers among the established interests.

The article then goes on to discuss how the W3C and ICANN are now basically corporate run entities where big tech firms coordinate internet technologies, which is true. 

So what would real democracy on the internet actually look like?

I think it would look like a cross between LinkedIn and EOS. The architecture and operating system could function along the lines of how EOS allocates resources. How different programs and protocols interact are determined by those using them.

The LinkedIn piece comes in where your identity and skills are verified by others through a social proof mechanism. Some sort of anti-fraud-ring mechanism would have to be built.

In the future, I fully expect an identity-verified blockchain voting system to be developed that can prevent all the nonsense we've seen over the last few days here in the US. 

Except that I don't becuase “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.”