"The Internet was supposed to be free and ubiquitous, but a cable cartel would rather rake in profits than provide universal service. It was supposed to enable small producers, but instead it has given rise to some of the most mammoth corporations of all time. It was supposed to create a decentralized media system, but the shift to cloud computing has recentralized communications in unprecedented ways. It was supposed to make our culture more open, but the companies that dominate the technology industry are shockingly opaque. It was supposed to liberate users but instead facilitated all-invasive corporate and government surveillance.

"Instead of eliminating middlemen and enabling peer-to-peer relationships, it has empowered an influential and practically omnipresent crop of mediators. Instead of making our relationships horizontal and bringing prosperity to all, the gap between the most popular and the practically invisible, the haves and have-nots, has grown. Instead of unshackling individuals from the grip of high-priced spectacles, it has helped entertainment firms dominate global audiences. Instead of decommodifying art and culture, every communication has become an advertising opportunity.

"The utopian undercurrents that suffused these erroneous predictions are not the problem. The problem is that we have not confronted the obstacles that have impeded them, particularly the economic ones. A more open, egalitarian, participatory, and sustainable culture is profoundly worth championing, but technology alone cannot bring it into being. Left to race along its current course, the new order will come increasingly to resemble the old, and may end up worse in many ways. But the future has not been decided.

"Our communications system is at a crossroads, one way leading to an increasingly corporatized and commercialized world where we are treated as targeted consumers, the other to a true cultural commons where we are nurtured as citizens and creators. To create a media environment where democracy can thrive, we need to devise progressive policy that takes into account the entire context in which art, journalism, and information are created, distributed, discovered, and preserved, online and off. We need strategies and policies for an age of abundance, not scarcity, and to invent new ways of sustaining and managing the Internet to put people before profit. Only then will a revolution worth cheering be upon us."