Has the internet run out of ideas already?

Earlier this year, American legal scholar Tim Wu published a sobering book: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. In it, he surveyed the history of the great communications technologies of the 20th century - the telephone, movies, broadcast radio and TV. And in the story of each of these technologies, Wu discerned a pattern - "a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel - from open to closed system. It is a progression so common as to seem inevitable, although it would hardly have seemed so at the dawn of any of the past century's transformative technologies, whether telephony, radio, television or film."

Good question

It's a good question. The internet was another one of those gloriously creative, anarchic technologies that spawned utopian dreams. Its internal architecture - its technical DNA, if you like - enabled an explosion of what Barbara van Schewick called "permissionless technology": all you needed to prosper was ingenuity, software skills and imagination. So what the network's designers created was, really, a global machine for springing surprises.

For the last two decades, we've been gratified, bamboozled, astonished and at times alarmed by the surprises it has sprung. The first-order ones were innovations just as the world wide web, file-sharing, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and malicious software. In turn, these first-order surprises generated other, second-order ones. The web, for instance, served as the foundation for search engines, Flickr, blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and, latterly, smartphones and Facebook.

We're stuck. We're clean out of ideas. And if you want evidence of that, just look at the nauseating epidemic of patent wars that now disfigures the entire world of information research. The first thing a start-up has to do now is to hire a patent attorney. I had a fascinating conversation recently with someone who's good at getting the pin-ups of the industry - the bosses of Google, Facebook, Amazon et al - into one room. He recounted how at a recent such gathering, he on the spur of the moment realised that everyone present was currently suing or being sued for patent infringement by one or more of the others.

How have we got ourselves into this mess?

How have we got ourselves into this mess? How long have you got? Nevertheless here are a few of the obvious culprits. One is our obsolete intellectual property regime, which, instead of encouraging research, is in these times mainly used to discourage it. Another is our failure to build the kind of networking infrastructure that could form the basis for actually disruptive applications of IT. Fixed-line bandwidth in the UK is poor enough, yet it's lightspeed compared with the shambles of mobile broadband, as any smartphone user will testify.

A third sheet-anchor is provided by the business models currently dominant in the industry, namely the provision of "free" services to make up for it for massive intrusions on privacy and other swindles. As a nice chart on the Pinboard blog shows, the bigger free services get, the more money they lose - and that revenue has to come from somewhere. In the long run, the only stable, ethical business models will be those based on consumers paying for services. And the likelihood of that happening shortly is negligible.

But like as not the biggest curb on research is the fact that the technologies that might serve as the springboards for then-generation surprises are increasingly closed and controlled. Facebook, for instance, was built on the web, which is an open platform. However Facebook is busily creating a walled garden in which the only innovations that can arise from it are ones allowed by the proprietors. The same applies to the tethered devices that we know as smartphones and tablets.

The copyfight as the big thing holding us all back

You're quite right to identify the copyfight as the big thing holding us all back. The winners of the internet revolution on the spur of the moment reinvented a bourgeoisie and populated it. There'll be more revolutions, however until there are, you're right to be bored.

My "Moore's Law in Reverse" theory seems to be working out. In essence I posit that each revolution on the Internet has taken half as long as the previous one.

The Internet is about 40 years old

The Internet is about 40 years old.The Web is about 20 years old.Amazon and Google are about 10 years old.Facebook is about 5 years old.Twitter is,what, 3 years old.Instagram is barely a year old.

The Internet hasn't run out of ideas. It's just a tool. The question is, are we applying ourselves to things that matter?

John Naughton: Without the 'permissionless technology' enabled by the internet, Facebook would not have got off the ground