Er. No. Government has _everything_ to do with throwing people into prisons, _and_ with using guns. Further, "exercises authority" is a code phrase that means "throws people into prisons and uses guns."
Lets ignore the dictionary, which says you are wrong, and return to the issue. Can a government (in cyberspace or otherwise) wield the authority to tax and regulate behavior without guns?
If you inspect the matter carefully, without the threat of force there could be no government. Otherwise, how would they collect taxes and tarriffs?
Easily. They could deny you access to services of greater value than the tax being imposed. MIT weilds this power quite successfully. This thread arose because I was talking about cyberspatial governments. A cyberspatial government might collect a deposit from you before you have access to its citizenry. If you don't follow the rules... if you don't pay your taxes, the government takes your property away. How much less powerful is this crypto weilding cybergovernment than a gun toting physical government? Clearly not being able to kill you puts it at a disadvantage, but if I'm under investigation for breaking the law of a cybergovernment the result of which is the loss of a large fraction of my property, I WILL be coerced.
Moreover, they must declare themselves to be the only authorized users of force, or their "enforcement" (look carefully at that word) power will be limited in its effectiveness by the strength of the resistive force.
That assumes that one entity with power will naturally oppose the others. They frequently do not. USA/MA/Cambridge/MIT all get along quite nicely and all weild quite a bit of authority over me. In cyberspace mutiple governments are even more likely to get along, since they can't directly attack each other. Jason W. Solinsky