“The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media—and of the Web itself?“

A well considered piece in The Atlantic, dissecting the cultural underpinnings of the rise of the internet and framing the battle between Google and Apple in an interesting way. Michael Hirschorn connects the idea of “Manifest Destiny”, to the pioneers of the internet as a social idea, utopians from West Coast USA who proposed using the network of copper cables laid around the world to expand consciousness and build a new kind of ecology of ideas and information.

Well worth a read.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/closing-the-digital-frontier/8131/1/