I remember the day the Internet was "born" (I mean the day it was deregulated. This was the day the Gore bill was passed that opened up the Internet to anyone and you no longer needed a government contract to connect to it).

It was a warm Spring day in 1995. I was addressing a group of advertisers about some custom programming I was doing on a proprietary weather information broadcasting platform (a terrible, restrictive platform that seems inconceivable today: will we return to that again?). I explained how our work together this day forward would profoundly change because of the deregulation of the Internet. They totally didn't get it. This day serves as a bookend of that day. Today the Internet has died. Arrested on the operating table by Doctors Google and Verizon. We can hope maybe the FCC will step in and revive it but I fear the worst.

I blame the iPad for this in large part. The iPad showed big companies like Verizon ways in which it could capture a large audience that might not know what they're getting isn't from the Internet and might not care, since they were paying a subscription service anyway for access. It could peel them away and lock them in.

My own experience with the iPad was troubling. Leaving aside the cavity-search-like experience of being an Apple iTouch developer, I found the apps were very user friendly but only in very specific ways. It was easy to bid on something in the ebay app. It was really hard to research a seller's history. For that I had to turn to the Safari web browser. The ebay app illustrates a return to a CD-ROM interactive experience of the early 90's: where you can't find your own way through a site, all the decisions are made for you in advance.

I didn't like it and it spoke volumes to me of things to come. And so here we are. We now witness the death of broad, flat views of information. The end of allowing me to decide my own path through the data. Now it will be a rough-hewn backwater trail, or pure bushwhacking.

Developments like the Internet are really path-dependent. Civilizations really only have one chance to do this. It's like the invention of printing. But now the Printer is owned exclusively by The Man.