End of the Internet"

There's probably no shortage of people who decry the "end of the Internet as we know it."

Some think it is a good thing, in the sense of the Internet becoming a utility like electricity. "The biggest take-away from last week’s Consumer Electronics Show is that every device in our lives is rapidly becoming a computer connected to the Internet," says Edgelings CEO Tom Hayes. "That new reality means the Internet will soon transition from the conspicuous to the unconscious; from something you go “onto” to something you never go off of-and in fact hardly even think about."

Others worry or lament the emergence of "private," traffic-shaped," managed or other forms of IP networks. There are public policy issues, to be sure.

But IP networks are more than the Internet, and the Internet itself is changing. And there is a paradox here. Ask anybody in the communications policy community whether the Telecommunications Act of 1996 succeeded and you'll get, as often as not, an argument that it has failed in some major way. But ask those same people whether their own choice, value and services are better now than they were then, and everybody will say "yes, my services are better, cheaper, more valuable."

Ask many policy advocates about the health of the Internet and they will say things are terrible, for any number of reasons. But ask those same people whether the Internet is more valuable today--much more valuable and useful--than it was before 1996. I suspect we all know the answer.

There are serious public policy issues, of course. But the Internet is not now what it was. Neither are television; radio; audio; magazines; newspapers; theaters; library catalogs; classifieds; phones; computers or data networks. In one sense, we can "save" the Internet about as meaningfully as we can "save" black and white, monaural, NTSC, broadcast television.

End? How about "beginning"?