The essence of the Internet is that it’s very open, decentralized and populist; a place where knowledge is democratized and mass collaboration is the source of power. It challenges organizations, institutions and systems that are just the opposite; human structures that are confidential or closed, centralized, designed for creating proprietary intellectual products, organized on authority principles, and where power is maintained by controlling knowledge.

So we’re witnessing a revolution spawned by the Internet that’s growing and morphing. There’s no stopping it and there can be no debate that the previous way of being organized and working that ruled last century was better (or worse.) It doesn’t really matter. The genie is out of the bottle and we need to understand how we’re going to adapt to the unanticipated events (risks) that will be driven by the new order of the Internet.

Right now, I believe that the stage is being set in the politics of Canada for a new set of entirely unanticipated events driven by this new way of doing things, made possible by Internet technologies. How this will affect regulators, more on that later, but consider the scenario that’s unfolding.

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