What will the first internet country look like?

Probably nothing sexy.

This is a guest essay by Eman Zabi for Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

“The nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life.”

—Daniel Bell

It is easier to build a life across borders than to secure protection across them. Increasingly, people work for a company in one country, live in another, hold savings in a digital wallet, and spend much of their social and professional life online. But when something goes wrong, when a payment is frozen, an account is banned, a contract breaks, or care is needed far from home, it becomes clear how little of that life is actually governed as a whole.

That asymmetry between how we live and how we’re governed has helped give rise to the idea of the internet country: a political form that might close the gap between transnational life and territorial protection. I should preface this by saying I’m sceptical of most current talk about internet countries. Some writers treat online communities as nascent polities; others treat digital platforms as quasi-sovereign powers. Both capture something real. But neither is yet a country.

Platforms may govern, extract, and dominate, but that does not make them countries. And if the first internet country were simply a shared online world with a common identity, internal economy, and symbolic borders, then it would already have existed. Forgive the facetiousness, but in 1999, Neopets, an early online virtual world centred on digital pets and a user-driven economy, offered users a bounded digital world, a native currency, markets, rules, and a thick layer of collective meaning. Yet no one mistook Neopia for a sovereign order.

The question is not whether people can gather, trade, and belong online. We’ve seen that they can. The question is what would make such a formation not merely a community nor a platform, but a country?

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll borrow a set of definitions from international relations scholar, Christopher Reus-Smit: a nation refers to a people bound by a shared sense of identity. In contrast, a state refers to the sovereign political organisation that governs a population, usually within a territory. A country is the ordinary, less precise term for something that combines both.

Sovereignty, then, in this context, should be understood not simply as control over territory, but as the recognised authority to make, interpret, and enforce rules within a given domain. Empires and nation-states historically bundled this authority within geography. An internet country, if it emerges, would represent a partial and domain-specific form of sovereignty, not over land, but over aspects of digital and transnational life.

What, then, is an internet country and what will it actually look like? To answer that, let’s look at the evolution of the modern nation-state.

The evolving purpose of the state

In his work on the moral purpose of the state, Reus-Smit highlights that political orders do not arise from abstract principles alone. They emerge when changing forms of social and economic life make older models of authority inadequate.

In ancient Greece, fragmented city-states with no central authority and constant local conflict developed arbitration as a way to resolve disputes without collapsing the system itself, a discursive, speech-based conception of justice that reflected the participatory culture of the polis. Renaissance Italy, facing factionalism, instability, and reputation-driven power, evolved diplomacy into something ritualised and symbolic, where survival depended as much on perception as force. In absolutist Europe, the breakdown of feudal order and the violence of religious war made hierarchy and authority paramount, producing dynastic sovereignty and a conception of law grounded in recognised authority rather than mutual agreement.

Modern international society emerged under a different set of conditions again: capitalism, industrialisation, expanding markets, and the need for predictable cooperation at scale, giving rise to liberal sovereignty, multilateralism, and contractual international law. Each institutional order emerged as a response to a specific configuration of social, economic, and political pressures. However, those pressures only became institutions when the ideas underpinning the purpose of political authority changed.

To understand what the first internet country will look like, we need to identify the problems that define our moment and why they may require a new kind of political order. If Reus-Smit is right that institutional orders are shaped by beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, then the first internet country will be defined by a different purpose. Its role would not be to organise life within a territory, but to secure agency and protection for individuals whose lives are no longer contained within one. In other words, the shape of the first internet country will be determined by the reasons that necessitated its creation.

The digital state of nature

The defining problems of our moment are socio-technical. Social, economic, and political life have become increasingly networked and transnational, while the structures that govern them remain territorially bounded, fragmented, and often privately controlled. One of the clearest expressions of this is a growing jurisdictional mismatch. A person can work for an American company, live in Portugal, be paid through a global payments platform, and hold assets in crypto, yet their rights and protections remain tied to a single territory.

Those protections do not travel cleanly across borders, and when something goes wrong no single authority is fully responsible. For example, if a person is paid through a global platform and their account is suddenly frozen, they may find themselves caught between the platform’s internal processes, the regulations of the country in which the company operates, and the legal system of the country in which they reside, with no clear or timely path to recourse.

This mismatch is compounded by the fragmentation of identity in digital space. There is no stable, widely recognised identity layer that can anchor participation across systems. Instead, individuals exist as a loose bundle of partial identities: a Google account, a biometric passport, a LinkedIn profile, a wallet address. Each serves a function, but none fully maps onto the others, none travels seamlessly, and none provides a consistent basis for rights, obligations, or recognition.

Where identity is fragmented, recourse is weak. When something goes wrong online, there is often no credible, shared authority to appeal to. Platform bans are opaque, cross-border disputes are slow and uncertain, and fraud or broken contracts can be difficult to enforce. What is missing is not simply better systems, but a common judge: a legitimate structure of adjudication capable of resolving disputes according to consistent and recognisable procedures. For example, if an influencer who makes their income on Tiktok gets banned, there is often no recognised, independent forum in which that decision can be meaningfully reviewed and contested, leaving individuals dependent on the platform’s own opaque processes rather than a shared system of adjudication.

At the same time, governance has not disappeared from online life; it has been privatised. Platforms already govern speech, identity, and economic participation at enormous scale, determining who can speak, transact, and remain within their systems. Yet they do so as private actors rather than public institutions. Their rules can change unilaterally, accountability is limited, and users have little meaningful representation. Power is being exercised, but it is exercised without the obligations that typically define political authority.

These developments are part of a broader process: the unbundling of state functions.

Two of the clearest emerging rails are crypto and AI. Crypto provides mechanisms for transnational payments, shared ledgers, treasury management, and programmable coordination without relying on a single national banking system. AI, by contrast, expands and begins to externalise state functions: analysing census data, assisting welfare assessments, detecting fraud, and in some cases informing judicial processes. We’re already seeing this happen. Risk assessment tools like COMPAS, developed by a private corporation, estimate a defendant’s likelihood of reoffending and have been used by the US government to inform bail and sentencing decisions. While crypto reconfigures components of state financial infrastructure, AI begins to unbundle administrative capacity from the state, allowing functions once embedded in public bureaucracies to be performed across a dispersed set of platforms and institutions. But together they illustrate how core functions once bundled within the state are being rebuilt in modular, networked, often under private or hybrid control: interoperable in practice, yet not institutionally integrated into a new political order.

The result of this fragmentation is most visible in the domain of protection. Welfare systems, healthcare, insurance, pensions, legal safeguards, remain largely territorial, even as individuals move fluidly across borders and spend increasing portions of their lives online. The more mobile a person becomes, the more fragile these protections tend to be. Someone with a Canadian passport, living in Thailand, employed by a US company, and paid through a global platform may discover that the pension they are contributing to is tied to another system, their medical history is tied up with their GP at home, and when a contract or payment dispute arises, no single institution is clearly responsible for resolving it, let alone helping them get back on their feet. (For now anyway. The Nomad Citizen team at SafetyWing and Plumia is working to solve this.)

These pressures may intensify further if AI accelerates the erosion of stable, salaried work. In earlier social orders, protection was often accessed not through universal public institutions but through dependence on households, patrons, or employers. In Renaissance Italy, for example, someone in financial or legal trouble might turn to the powerful family that employs them for a loan, for backing in a dispute, or for protection against local rivals. Modern welfare states partially displaced that arrangement, but they never fully replaced the employer as a conduit of security. Much of the modern system still rests on relatively durable employer–employee relationships. If that foundation weakens, the logic by which benefits, protections, and long-term security are distributed comes under strain.

What is striking is that this concern is no longer confined to critics of technological change. Even firms building frontier AI are increasingly framing the challenge in terms of industrial policy, workforce transition, and portable benefits, suggesting that the disruption in question is institutional as much as economic. If AI weakens the stabilising role of employment while states remain territorially bounded and strained, then the institutional basis of protection, built around stable employment, predictable contributions, and employer-linked benefits, greater demands are likely to fall on state systems that are already poorly designed for lives lived across borders.

Taken together, these are not isolated issues but symptoms of a deeper misalignment: the structures of political authority no longer match the organisation of modern life. The social contract has not disappeared, but it has become uneven: strong within borders, weak across them. If previous institutional orders emerged in response to the pressures of their time, the question now is, what kind of political order can address these ones?

Hobbes provides the conceptual bridge between territorial political theory and the possibility of online governance. In his account, individuals leave the state of nature not out of idealism, but out of rational self-interest: where there is no common power to adjudicate disputes and secure peace, life becomes marked by fear, mistrust, and insecurity. The digital equivalent is not a literal war of all against all, but a condition of the institutional fragmentation we just laid out. Through this lens, the digital world resembles a Hobbesian state of nature: not because it lacks rules, but because it lacks a shared authority capable of making them binding and contestable. So if the first internet country were to emerge, it would be when individuals decide that submitting to a shared digital constitutional order offers more security and agency than remaining exposed to this fragmented environment. Its legitimacy would rest on protection. But unlike Hobbes’s absolute Leviathan, its authority would necessarily be partial and layered, supplementing rather than replacing the territorial state.

What an internet country is not

Before defining what an internet country is, it is necessary to say what it is not. We’ve established that a country needs two things: shared identity and belonging (nation) + system of binding institutions, rules, and authority (state). Many digital formations have one of these. Very few formations have both.

It is not a fandom, interest group, or online community. These may generate strong identity, shared language, and even norms of behaviour, but they lack binding authority. Membership is expressive rather than constitutive; participation signals affiliation, not obligation. There are no enforceable rules, no stable procedures, and no meaningful recourse when conflict arises. A subreddit, a Discord server, or even a tightly knit online collective may feel cohesive, but it does not organise political life. It connects people; it does not govern them. And no, mod bans don’t count as governance.

It is not a DAO. This may be controversial, but an internet country is not, at least in my opinion, a DAO. A decentralised autonomous organisation may coordinate capital, allocate resources, and vote on proposals, but that does not make it a polity. Most DAOs resemble investment clubs or experimental corporate governance structures more than constitutional orders. Token-weighted voting turns political membership into ownership, granting greater influence to those with greater financial stake rather than recognising members as political equals with standing, rights, and obligations. Governance, in this context, becomes an extension of capital allocation. My local sports club holds an annual general meeting, grants members voting rights, and owns the land we train on. But country it is not.

It is not a platform. While Big Tech increasingly exercises forms of governance by shaping speech, identity, and economic participation, it does so as private actors, not as public authorities. Their power, however extensive, is exercised through terms of service rather than constitutional obligation. They are the East India Trading Company to the British Empire a powerful entity in their own right, but an extension of the nation state, and of the nation state’s soft power. The difference between a platform and a polity is not that one enforces rules and the other does not, but that one enforces them at discretion, while the other enforces them through institutions. A moderator can remove you; a polity must justify, process, and be accountable for doing so.

It is not a SaaS platform Finally, an internet country is not a SaaS product, no matter how comprehensive its offering. A service that provides identity, payments, insurance, or coordination tools may solve real problems, but it remains a service. Users opt in and out as customers, not as members of a political order. The relationship is transactional, not constitutional. A polity does not merely provide functionality; it creates legitimate authority, binds individuals through shared rules, and establishes mechanisms of accountability and recourse. Until that threshold is crossed, the language of “internet country” remains metaphor rather than reality.

So, how then will the first internet country emerge?

What distinguishes an internet country, then, is not that it exists online, but that it institutionalises public life on the internet. It must do more than connect, entertain, or transact. It must establish durable rules, legitimate decision-making, accountable authority, and some meaningful bundle of common goods.

What, then, would it look like in practice?

My best guess is that the first internet country will not look especially romantic at first. It will look, instead, like a stack of public institutions. An internet country does not emerge when infrastructure exists, but when it becomes unavoidable. The threshold is crossed when its institutions become the default layer of coordination and recourse for a meaningful domain of life, as a system they cannot easily opt out of.

At its base would sit a constitutional charter. Unlike community guidelines or boilerplate terms of service, this would not simply regulate behaviour within a platform, but define the terms of membership itself: rights, obligations, amendment procedures, and due process.

On top of that would sit a digital identity system, secure enough to support signatures, payments and governance, much as Estonia’s e-Residency already enables authentication and remote company formation for non-residents.

A treasury layer could collect dues, manage reserves and fund common goods through transparent accounting and auditable payment rails, similar in user experience to how platforms like Wise or Revolut allow individuals to move and manage money across borders, but governed as a public system rather than a private financial service

Perhaps, a legal layer would provide online dispute resolution, drawing on the same principles of fairness, transparency and accountability that underpin UN Trade Law’s dispute resolution framework. A representative layer would give members standing not simply as token holders but as political participants.

A welfare layer could offer portable forms of collective protection, like insurance, emergency support, credentials, and trusted records, rather than trying to replicate the full social state from the outset. And because digital institutions alone are insufficient, the system would also need physical nodes in existing jurisdictions: offices, campuses, service hubs, or special legal arrangements through which online membership could acquire territorial depth.

So the first internet country will look less like a state uploaded to the cloud and more like a coalition of cross-border constitutional public infrastructure.

In practice, this will likely feel like acquiring a second layer of citizenship. Much like becoming part of a territorial state, there would be a process of enrolment, recognised membership, and a set of obligations and benefits. But unlike territorial citizenship, this layer would not govern where you live, but how you participate across borders.

A member might hold a recognised digital identity that allows them to sign contracts, receive payments, and access services across jurisdictions. Their income, whether earned from a company in one country or through online work, could flow through a shared financial layer that manages contributions to a common pool. In return, they gain access to portable forms of protection: insurance that applies regardless of where they live, a system of dispute resolution that can adjudicate conflicts with employers or platforms, and a set of records and credentials that remain valid across systems.

If a payment is frozen, a contract breaks, or an account is banned, they would not be limited to a platform’s internal processes or a single national legal system, but could appeal to a recognised, transnational forum for review, rather than relying solely on the discretion of private platforms or fragmented national systems.

This still leaves the question of the nation. If a country requires both institutions and a sense of shared identity, then the architecture described above only solves half the problem. It gives us a state-like structure, but not yet a people.

Can an internet country have a national identity?

Historically, nations were not engineered in advance; they were produced through shared experience, common institutions, and repeated participation in collective life. Language, media, education, law, and bureaucracy do not merely reflect national identity, they help create it. The same logic applies here. An internet country would not begin with a fully formed sense of nationhood. It would grow one over time.

The nation of an internet country is unlikely to be based on ethnicity, geography, or even culture in the traditional sense. It is more likely to be grounded in shared conditions and shared commitments. Membership would be defined less by where someone is from and more by how they participate: a common relationship to mobility, to digital life, to cross-border work, and to the institutions that structure that life. What binds members together is not origin, but orientation.

That identity would be reinforced through practice. Using the same identity system, relying on the same dispute-resolution mechanisms, contributing to and drawing from the same pool of common goods, these are not just functional interactions, but identity-forming ones. Over time, they produce familiarity, expectation, and mutual recognition. A member is not simply a user of services, but someone who shares in a system of rights, obligations, and protections that others also recognise and uphold.

There is also a cultural layer, but it emerges second. Narratives, symbols, and shared language would follow from participation rather than precede it. If early nation-states were built through print media and schooling, an internet country would likely be built through interfaces, rituals of participation, and shared digital environments.

Culture emerges not from shared interests, but from shared experiences. Over time, these repeated interactions would produce a shared experience of navigating the system. We have seen this dynamic before: the sound of an AOL dial-up connection, the interface of early Facebook, or even the notification of a Slack huddle became instantly recognisable markers of participation in a shared environment. If culture stems from our shared experiences of being citizens of this internet country, then what is the creative expression of that culture? What would the sounds of the internet country be? What would the memes?

The result is a different kind of nation: one that is opt-in, transnational, and institutional rather than inherited. It is not given at birth, but acquired through membership and maintained through participation. It is less about who you are, and more about the system you are part of.

This also suggests where such a nation might first emerge. Not from social platforms or online communities, but from environments that already approximate institutional coordination at scale. In that sense, crypto ecosystems demonstrate coordination without territory, but not yet governance with legitimacy. They’ve begun to assemble some of the underlying components: shared identity through wallets, collective treasury management, programmable coordination, and a degree of transparency in how resources are allocated and decisions are executed.

These systems remain incomplete. Many collapse into speculation, and governance is often dominated by capital rather than structured as a political order. But they do demonstrate something important: that it is possible to organise large, transnational groups of people around shared infrastructure rather than shared territory.

In that sense, the first internet country would not replace the nation-state, but exist alongside it. Its members would, at least initially, be dual citizens: embedded in territorial systems for coercive authority and physical protection, while participating in a parallel digital polity that governs aspects of their economic, social, and institutional life. Where the nation-state is rigid and territorially bounded, the internet country could be adaptive, transnational, and responsive to the needs of networked life.

This would not be a collection of separate services, but a more integrated system: the same identity used to sign a contract would link to payments, contributions, and access to protection, and to a recognised process for resolving disputes. Where the nation-state is tied to place, this system would travel with the individual, providing continuity across jurisdictions.

Transparency would likely be one of its defining features. It would involve intelligible rules, auditable processes, and clear lines of accountability that make governance legible to its members in ways that many existing institutions are not. The point is not radical openness, but credible trust.

The first internet country will not be declared. It will become recognisable sometime in the next two to three decades, when a set of digital institutions becomes the default layer of coordination and recourse for a sufficiently large and transnational population.

So if Reus-Smit is right, and institutional orders change when the moral purpose of political authority changes, the question, then, is whether we are beginning to see such a shift. If so, the first internet country will not look like a nation moved online, but like a new answer to an old problem: how to organise collective life under conditions that existing institutions can no longer fully contain.

The appeal of such a polity is not novelty. Most people are not waiting for a flag in the cloud. They are looking for something more ordinary and more important: institutions that can recognise them, protect them, and travel with them through a life that no longer fits neatly inside one place.