Governance & E-Voting on Blockchain: a
step forward to ‘Democratic Internet’?
The Internet gives the means to connect people world-widely and to access to a universe of services and knowledge. The Internet has been and is a place where “Freedom of Expression” is by-design (let’s not comment on state-sponsored censorship…). But all that glitters are not gold, many problematic aspects arisen and are becoming more and more daunting. We here start addressing one of the biggest:
Is the Internet democratic?
The seminal Lawrence Lessig’s analysis Code is Law approaches the problem pointing out the main issues for regulating the Internet:
• Borders — we build our lives in bordered digital places, any legal behaviour within a border may still end up in damaging an Internet neighbour;
• Governors Regulation — classical legislative bodies would not be able to regulate the Internet, it is not a legal entity;
• “Jake’s Community” — a person apparently harmless in the real life could be harmful on the Internet;
• Sniffer Worm — software and all Internet-connected Things even if conceived for ‘good purposes’ they may end up hampering unaware users.
Lessig points out that (software) Code is the new lawmaker.
To be a real transparent lawmaker, the code must be open-source (or closed but modular) so to all affected people would be able to understand what the rules in the code are. Such kind of “regulation” is not for controlling
every one, but to regulate how the previous regulatory issues are dealt with in practice. However, implementing real open-source code systems on the Internet poses critical challanges due to the nature of the Internet architecture: no one is in control. With the advent of blockchain technology a little step forward can be done, specially thanks to the Ethereum-like blockchains offerring smart contract, immutable piece of code deployed and executed on blockchain.
Blockchain is a relatively new, disruptive technology with a wide range of application in business, politics and support new types of society management. It was firstly popularised as the core of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, a virtual coin with a payment system based on a decentralized peer-to-peer network.
A blockchain per se is a list of transactions (e.g., payment of Bitcoin) containing the issuer, the receiver and all other needed payloads (e.g. the amount of bitcoins to tansfer). The ordering of transactions is achieved via a distributed consensus algorithm based on so-called Proof-of-Work.
Intuitively, say Bicoin’s, we have that:
Due to computational intensive mechanism at the basis of Proof-of-Work, the ledger of transaction is practically immutable and tampering proof and most of all without any human nor centralised/trusted-party controlling part of the system. In other words, blockchain gives decentralised trust or “trust-by-computation” that shifts from “trusting people to trusting math”.
Bitcoin is just an example of how blockchain could be use to regulate the Internet, building trust in a trust-less scenario.
Smart contract à la Ethereum pushes the bar toward a new Internet regulation. Smart contract provides a decentralised, open-source computing platform. A built-in programming language allows the writing and execution of smart contracts so to develop decentralised autonomous apps (DApps). Being built upon blockchain, DApps offer at hand property of Integrity, Immutability and Decentralization making possible the integration of policy regulation as part of the code itself.
A smart contract can then be used to to develop a protocol for decentralised, autnomous collaboration of parties whose governance is regulated via blockchain-based voting mechanisms. By way of example, members interact within the organisation via governance proposals and vote: when a proposal is submitted the members can vote in support or against it. Blockchain is here used to regulate and carry out a transparent, tampering-proof governance model.
Classical centralised (or partially based on trusted third party) Internet architectures cannot achieve decentralised and democratic governance as blockchain enables. Thanks to transparency, modularity and open source of code given at hand by smart contract blockchain, new mechanisms for (partial) Internet regulation is now feasible. Voting, governance management, and border regulations are just the first functionalities we can support.
