Mass distribution of ingenuity and choice [via the Internet]

With another three to five years of exponential growth, the Internet will reach one billion people. At that scale, the Net will have a completely different audience: the world's current TV watchers, who are much less forgiving of service failures and exposed complexity. The Internet must emerge, ultimately, as a utility. Along the way, two powerful forces will shape the Net and the types of businesses that thrive there: the world as a global laboratory (where everyone will be able to see and build upon each other's innovations) and direct market adoption. Both phenomena concern the mass distribution of ingenuity and choice. This could result in chaos: with so many new ideas and so little global planning, the Net could become too cacophonous and disorganized to be useful to most people. To address this, the Net must increasingly adopt societal scaling mechanisms, such as context, community, intermediation and syndication.