tl;dr: The Internet is an international nation and we should start taking the necessary steps to gain a culture which understands as much.
```Meaning of Country```
What is a country? Is a country its people, its borders, its bureaucracy, its military, or a combination of all these things? Whatever denotative definition of country we may have in our dictionaries, even if it goes against this concept, I say that definition must be expanded to include things such as the Internet. Most people believe in a connotative definition of a country being a conceivable place with citizens who follow some form of governance.
The Internet is a place and while this place is quite abstract, it is nonetheless far too real for people to ignore or play off as just a piece of technology. When a webpage appears on my computer, I say that I have gone to a webpage; much like how you would say you have gone to a city or state. When a moderator punishes me, I am given a warning or banned from the webpage; much like how police can punish you or ban you from a county. Mods can delete or hide messages; much like how in real life countries can try to censor or hide certain messages.
```Allegory between Website Governance and Country Governance```
An owner runs a website, much like how a mayor runs a city, or a governor runs a state, or a prime minister runs a country. An owner's group of administrators helps the owner run the website, much like for instance how the President of the United States' "administration" helps the President run the country. By this metaphor moderators can be considered an allegory for governors while high-ranking/influential users can be considered an allegory for mayors. Owners, administrators, moderators, and notable users operate like any other political officials in real life. They set up guidelines/rules which are the allegorical laws of the land. They vie for and argue over power distribution and what abilities they do and do not have. Notable users can organize protests against mods, mods can organize protests against admins, and admins are payed to work for the owner or quit; just like how notable citizens can protest governors and governors and protest the president and their administration. While in real life we call signs and buttons propaganda, on the Internet these things are commonly called memes and can be posted for the same purposes.
```What do we do if we choose to believe this?```
The Internet is worth fighting for and you already see this through hacktivist causes against old and new bills such as the classic SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA which went against net neutrality. But to take this to the next level and form the Internet into an official country, is actually not going to be as difficult as you would think. First, various drafts for how this new Internet government should operate would need to be formed by independent groups and committees. They would need to be debated in serious forums across the Internet and heavily compared and contrasted. Second, polls would need to be conducted across the Internet over various aspects of these new policies so that they are crafted with the user's thoughts in mind. Third, a final poll for if the Internet should be declared a country will need to be conducted through Facebook, since Facebook is notorious for their anti-fake account policies which will ensure real users are, for the most part, casting real votes.
(part 1 of 2)