Stephen Price (currently blogless) emailed me a link to David Isenburg's blog (added to my regular reads) and a wonderful quote from the Observer (Guardian Unlimited Website) by Rafael Behr (who I've met - small world)
In an era whose triumphant idea is capitalism, where success is generally measured in the accumulation of wealth, it is hard to conceive of a parallel society established and self-governed on principles of trust and common ownership. But it exists. The biggest aggregation of human experience and knowledge ever created belongs to everyone, it is available on demand and it is free.But for how long? Ranged against the new culture of digital freedom is a strange coalition of spooks, suits and vandals. There are governments unable to resist the technology that can track our every move; there are corporations lusting after the attention of the 2 billion eyeballs focused on screens; and there are the spammers, clogging up the net with junk mail, hijacking computers to peddle trash.
In a very detailed article he goes on to show how big business are becoming far more interested in what is going on and his pessimistic view is that the Internet will move over to the dark side:
I listen to today's web gurus, the people who preach freedom, and am fired with enthusiasm for the new digital society of the future. But I fear the odds are against them. An excess of idealism only seems to prove that the golden age of the web is, in fact, right now.
He could well be right.