I was fortunate to witness the birth of the world wide web up close. Initially, there were only pages of text connected by hyperlinks, but no people. So I formed one of the first internet start-ups, Ubique, with the mission of adding people to the web by developing social networking software which offered instant messaging, chat rooms and collaborative browsing.
Since then, internet civilisation has mushroomed. According to a report published last year by the International Telecommunications Union, there are now 3.2bn internet users worldwide. But what kind of civilisation has it become? Imagine that 300m Twitter users wanted to change its rules of conduct, or that a billion Facebook users wanted to change its management. Is this possible or even thinkable?
In 20 years, the internet has matured and has reached its equivalent of the Middle Ages. It has large feudal communities, with rulers who control everything and billions of serfs without civil rights. History tells us that the medieval era was followed by the Enlightenment. That great thinker of Enlightenment liberalism, John Stuart Mill, declared that there are three basic freedoms: freedom of thought and speech; freedom of “tastes and pursuits”; and the freedom to unite with others. The first two kinds of freedom are provided by the internet in abundance, at least in free countries.