Way forward for internet - are we ready for it?

These basic ingredients - openness, trust and decentralisation - were baked into the internet at its inception. It was these qualities, which allowed diverse groups of people from far-flung corners of the world to connect, experiment and invent, that were arguably the key elements of the explosive technological growth of the past two decades. That culture gave us the likes of Skype, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

The internet's decentralised structure also makes it difficult for even the most controlling regime to seal off its citizens from the rest of the world. China and North Korea are perhaps the most successful in this respect; by providing only a few tightly controlled points of entry, these governments can censor the data its people can access.Savvy netizens routinely circumvent such attempts, using social media and the web's cloak of anonymity to embarrass and even topple their governments. The overthrow of the Egyptian regime in February is being called by some the first social media revolution.

Though debatable, this assertion is supported in the book Tweets From Tahrir, an account told entirely through Twitter messages from the centre of the nation's capital.It is tempting to think that things can only get better - that the internet can only evolve more openness, more democracy, more innovation, more freedom.

There's a problem on the horizon, and it comes from an unexpected quarter - in fact from some of the very names we have come to associate most strongly with the internet's success. The likes of Apple, Google and Amazon are starting to fragment the web to support their own technologies, products and corporate strategy.

As millions of people buy into Apple's world of iPads and iPhones, they are also buying into Apple's restricted vision of the internet. The company tightly controls the technologies users are allowed to put on those devices.Take, for instance, Adobe's Flash software, which most PCs support and most websites use to run graphics and other multimedia, and even entire apps. Flash is prohibited in all

Apple apps, for security reasons - which means that the iPhone browser cannot display a large portion of the internet. That creates a private, Apple-only ecosystem within the larger internet.

Should we care? On the one hand, these companies have grown so big precisely because they make products and provide services that we want to use. The problem is that this concentration of power in the hands of a few creates problems for resilience and availability. That problem will only intensify with the ascendancy of the cloud, one of the biggest internet innovations of the past few years. The cloud is the nebulous collection of servers in distant locations that increasingly store our data and provide crucial services.

The cloud could generate exactly the single points of failure that the internet's robust architecture was supposed to prevent. And when those points fail, they may fail spectacularly. During an outage of Amazon's cloud service in April'11, when the company's servers went dark, entire companies briefly blinked out of existence.

Had the internet been built with bulletproof security in mind, we might never have reaped the rewards of breakneck innovation. Yet as our dependence on the internet grows, we are more vulnerable to those who seek to disrupt - whether they are hackers exposing the internet's weaknesses, governments intent on keeping their citizens under control, or corporations driven by profits.

So how many of the internet's fundamental properties do we want to change? The nature of our future online lives will depend on answering this question, on how we walk the tightrope between total security and innovation-friendly openness.