Today, Estonia launched its experimental e-citizenship initiative. With growing number of people bdwelling inside cyberspace worldwide, cyberspace will not remain as a ‘virtual’ space, but will expand its territory in which people will convene, reside and do their business in the future. And this territory is expanding, without limitation (up to this point) more than faster than ever in the human history. Estonia’s e-citizenship doesn’t come as a surprise given the fact that the ‘country’ has been a major target for cyberattacks for the past several years since 2007, and this landmark incident has awakened the country to get grips of this newly discovered space in the universe. What’s inherently different with this e-citizenship compared to any other ‘membership’ status for conventional websites is that you, the applicant, need to be accepted as a ‘citizen’ acknowledged by the Estonian government, and they can run their business, claim their rights as a real citizen for the territories made by the Estoninan government online. Although bitcoin still remains as a currency for a small number of people (mostly living in the U.S.) at this point of time being, this blockchain economy will also fast grow, which means Estonian e-citizenship can be a judicious, even outsmart strategy to distinguish the country from any other community under the name of ‘nation-state’ government. A number of companies aside from Paypal has already launched their regional version of online payment system, thus blockchain economy is only about to blossom into the physical world.
So, what’s the implication of E-citizenship? First and foremost, this can be a clever approach to guard a country’s online territory, and a prima-facie approach to attact more investments and e-entreprenuers so that its cyber territory can be a gather’s point for business, which always has been the focal point for prosperity. With low taxes (almost 0% tax for those gratified) and the possibility of anchoring the country as a port toward the whole world, business managers who want to exploit this opportunity will flock together, with which Estonian government can protect their online territories. (Think of how Swiss has maintained their neutrality, peace and prosperity at the same time.) Aside from businessman, tech savies can be the ones who can savor this opportunity of becoming a true world citizen. With digital technologies, Kant’s old idea of ‘cosmopolitan citizen’ seems to come into realization, starting from Estonia in this case.
However, at the same time, the country’s initiative can be a starting point for the ‘fragmentation of cyberspace’, which has been one of the concerns for Internet Experts. Recent increasing number of cyberattacks have alerted many of the countries and companies to be guarded on their networks, which used to be the ‘roads’ built in the air.