What Has Happened to Our Grand Experiment, the Internet?

Image by Planet Volumes.

By virtue of luck or just being in the right place at the right time, I was the first journalist to report on the advent of the public internet.

In the early 1990s, I was editor-in-chief of a trade magazine called Telecommunications. Vinton Cerf, widely considered to be “father of the internet,” was on our editorial advisory board. Once Sunday afternoon, Vint contacted me to let me know that the federal government was going to make its military communication system...