STEPHEN FRY

As a protest, this is a tad late and therefore redundant. The internet is outlaw territory. Organised society always seeks to gentrify the outlaw territories to eliminate the perceived threat posed to civilised society. The internet is currently operating as an effective black market. It is well documented that the younger generations, pure natives of this thing we used to call 'the information superhighway', no longer even recognise the notion of paying for music, movies, books, TV on demand, person to person communication etc. To them, the idea that you should hand over money for such things is absurd, almost alien.

Its obvious then, and its inevitable too, that eventually the rogue state of webistan will be ruthlessly subjugated, divided up amongst the corporations who are losing revenue (and losing face amongst their shareholders) and brought to heel as a servant of the big machine of business. Lets face it, the whole thing runs on big business hardware. How long did you expect it to last?

Its a bit pointless and unimaginative to think it can be halted with Facebook protests, government online petitions which provide amusing lunchtime reading material to bored politicians, and angry Tweeting.

The fact is that this is just the next chapter in an ongoing battle between the collective need for societal obedience and the individual desire for rebellious freedom. Big business is a fan of the former, as is government, so you will be throwing sparrows at tanks trying to stop this happening.

I think the point is to avoid wasting energy fighting a battle you will never win, and to start looking for the new deregulated frontier, because there will always be one, its human nature. Back in the days when everyone fought to save CB radio, nobody had any idea there would be such a thing as the internet. If the CB Radio war had been won, and had remained as an unregulated 'people's network' it would have died in the dust by now anyway, because along came mass adoption of the web, and cheap mobile phones, making it utterly redundant. The web will become utterly redundant in all but its basic functions and from then on it will merely be a collection of media channels, each with a specific field of purpose.

I guess my point here is that what you are fighting to save is not the internet, but freedom, and rest assured: freedom prevails. It does so by slipping away and re-establishing itself far from the talons of politics and economics. Its a wily beast that refuses to be tied down just because the infrastructure gets pwnd.

There is already a new unregulated network of like-minded people, busily building a new frontier. It is called, ironically and amusingly, Word Of Mouth. Like Phreaking before it, it utilises established hardware infrastructure that interestingly enough is not telecommunications based ... at least not in the way it is commonly understood. Unlike the internet it has no formal structure, its fizzles into life when WOMbats need it to, and then its gone, leaving no trace at all.

WOMbats have already decided that the internet today is what you are fearing it will become tomorrow. They are doing what the first internet users were doing... engaging in discourse, exchanging ideas, helping each other, building a network that more closely echoes communities in the sense that its about who you know and who you get to know, not what forum or social network you choose (ie its person-dependent not software dependent). In that way, the powers that be could no more close it down than they could instruct the people of Luton to stop talking to each other in the street.

It requires hardware though, and it does piggybag something albeit in a completely way to the internet. WOMBats are mute without their homemade specialised Altoid tin gizmos, which enable them to connect up (called 'batting')... so you can already see how it will eventually go mainstream 20 years from now when Apple releases its own "ibat" onto the market. For now, its underground, and big business is utterly blind to its presence, along with the vast majority of the global population.

One day people will mourn the subjugation of the true Wombat way, but there will be something new bubbling under the radar by then anyway, and the real outlaws will have long since departed.