Internet Renaissance Man Gordon Crovitz posits in his latest Wall Street Journal column, "Will the Internet Survive its 40th?" that it's sometimes "wiser for mortals to stand aside and leave technology to advance at its own pace. After its first 40 years delivering freedom and abundance, the Web has earned the benefit of the doubt."

CLOUD doesn't take positions on legislation and regulation like "net neutrality," but it agrees about the power of technology.

The power of the Internet comes from connecting people and democratizing access to content and conversations. Unfortunately, the importance of users isn't fully considered in pending net neutrality legislation or Federal Communications Commission regulatory proposals. Users simply aren't seen as potential participants in the ultimate decisions of legislators or regulators.

In any event, using technology like CLOUD's Context Markup Language (CTML) to empower individuals to find the right balance of price, speed, and capacity for themselves will ultimately make the entire net neutrality debate obsolete.

Net neutrality views of big players "are growing hazier," Crovitz reports. He notes a Washington Post interview in which Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, "It is possible for the government to screw the Internet up big time."

Indeed. Mistake number one happens when policymakers confuse the Web with the Internet. They are not synonyms. The former tends to connect people with commercial services; the latter tends to connect people with people. It is the individualism of the Internet, not the collectivism of the Web, that will ultimately prevail.

While cloud computing and cloud services are all the rage, the Web paradigm, because it's the Internet's most visible feature to both government and business policy makers, leads to short-sighted thinking. The longer the Internet is thought to be merely the wires that deliver services, the longer government and business policy will remain half-baked. The Internet requires new tools to connect people to each other, as well as it connects people to traditional corporate and government Web sites.

Crovitz writes:

The best defense against access providers' acting unreasonably is more competition. The alternative would treat the modern network of the Web as if it were the 19th-century network of railroads, with the FCC as a modern-day version of the Interstate Commerce Commission, which set rail rules and tariffs, slowing innovation in transportation until the agency was abolished in 1995 as a bureaucratic anachronism.

Bingo! In the first 40 years of Internet freedom and abundance, only the past 15 or so were delivered by HTML and the World Wide Web. CLOUD proposes that the next revolution of the Internet be achieved through a new language for people, not just Web pages.