Regarding democracy, Bruce Perens' main focus is the electronic media as a vehicle for democratic discourse. Voters base their vote on what the information they receive. Thus, bias in the media can tremendously influence the outcome of an election. Of interest is the evolution of mass communications as a vehicle for democratic discourse, and the influence on the vote of the various media:
Before Gutenberg, mass democracy was not possible because there was no mass communication. Political handbills had to be duplicated by hand by a copyist. Only the rich and the church could afford to employ copyists, and thus they could enforce their view upon others through their monopoly on written information. Literacy was not widespread.
With the advent of movable type, the common man gained the ability to create and distribute political handbills and to report news. This enabled the widespread political discourse that makes mass democracy possible. The press was the initiating tool of mass democracy.
Radio, and later, television broadcasting brought culture and events into the living-room, culminating in broadcast coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Democracy was both enhanced and hindered. It was enhanced because the common man could now be a witness to events more directly through television, and hindered because the broadcast frequencies were a scarce medium that eventually came to be dominated by the rich, who distorted television coverage to promote their own political interest. Thus, this era was at the same time an advance and a setback for democracy.
The internet era brought a chance to escape the problems of limited frequency spectrum and ownership of the media by the rich. For a while, the common man was able to operate a "broadcast station" and compete with the wealthy media conglomerates. But this era may be ending as network operators reject network neutrality and implement "tiered" service. On a tiered network, requests for independent content may be redirected to the network provider's own outlets. Content providers that do not pay the network provider will be carried with less speed or not carried at all.
Thus, Bruce Perens feels that network neutrality is vitally important to democracy. Without it, voters will have less access to independent opinions and those that conflict with the opinion of the network provider.
Open Standards are also important to democracy, because they allow all businesses and individuals to participate equally in communicating with each other. A closed protocol that is subject to intellectual property agreements would tend to empower the business that owns the protocol over others. Many closed protocols come with discriminatory license terms, and with royalty requirements that would shut out small and medium sized business and Open Source. Even in the case of Open Standards, royalty-bearing patent licenses may advantage some parties over others, and thus a royalty-bearing patent should not be allowed to be a component of an Open Standard.
Digital rights management (DRM) can also be a problem for democracy. Many DRM-based systems give their manufacturer complete control over the programs that the device will carry. Many DRM-based devices are sold on the "razor and blades" model. This means that the device is sold at less than its actual cost and the manufacturer recovers their expenses through a kickback from the content providers who are allowed to present on the device. This would generally deny access to poorly-funded entities and non-profits.
Bruce Perens writes, speaks, and lobbies about these issues.