Introduction

The early vision of the internet as a medium that could be used to develop new economic models and realise freedoms, including overthrowing dictatorships, was perhaps most influentially expounded in John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.¹ However, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s and the increasing corporate colonisation of what had been labelled an anarchic space led to pessimism by the early 2000s.