Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no

Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. This doesn't ring true to me. It is the lack of true freedom on the Internet that makes Facebook such an enormous success. If ISPs allowed users to connect to the Internet without any restrictions, it's quite possible they would be running the equivalent of web/mail/chat servers on their home computers, and a true social network might have evolved. As it is, such innovation is restricted to a much smaller group of individuals whose entrepreneurial motivations will impose even more restrictions on users (for example, web sites are springing up that require Facebook authentication, totally eliminating the choice to opt out of Facebook).