Utopia, limited

The man who coined the concept "net neutrality"  remembers- as do I- when the Internet wasn't mostly a freak show/corporate monopoly:

Back at the restaurant in Washington, I press Wu a bit more on the future. What happens if your nightmare comes to pass? What's your science-fiction-like vision of what the Internet might look like? 

You can imagine a world where a few people are once again the anointed creators, he responds, and the rest of us spend our time watching what they produce. Say Apple becomes the dominant platform. Want to start a new company? They decide which companies are good. People like blogs? OK, we'll have auditions for bloggers. Newspapers? Maybe we'll have two of them, one liberal and one conservative. 

Then he tells me another story, one from the past. It's sometime around the early 2000s. Craigslist is young. Strangers trust it. Wu, then living in San Francisco, posts an ad: "Who wants to climb Mt. Shasta next week?" Three people answer, and he climbs the volcano with one of them. 

"We may look back at this era, the last 15, 20 years, as that early utopian, exciting era of the open Internet," he says. 

"I've been happy to be alive during the Internet revolution. And I hope I will not live to see its death."