The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.

Movie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.

I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.

Although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favoring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel.

Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.