Internet Evolving to What It Was Intended

The original concept of the Internet was as a peer-to-peer network of hosts, sending information to each other as required. There was no DNS, each host kept its own local file of who was who.

Of course the explosive growth eventually made that structure untenable.
Commercialization moved us to a client-server model.
"The cloud" is the latest move in that direction where even client applications are being moved to servers.

But a couple of weaknesses are beginning to show in that model.
One is technical, the other is political.

Technically, as more and more work gets shifted to servers, the need for power for those services increases. Where today data is stored on your local machine, the "cloud" model has your machine accessing that data from a remote server. The two or three gigs of data that, today, you move around inside your computer every day now get pulled in and pushed out over that little blue wire (or your WiFi, which uses even MORE power). The server on the other end has to be able to handle that increased bandwidth.

The result is an explosive growth in the power consumption of the entire system. Simply put, the growth of the current model is unsustainable, and will eventually result in limits being placed upon it.

But the more interesting development is political.
The U.S. government's recent heavy-handed shutdown of domains that were suspected of carrying "pirated" information is concerning some very smart people.

Up to this point, the de-facto control of the Internet by the U.S. government has been regarded as fairly benign, because the U.S. government's behavior has been benign, even protective, of internet as a conduit for open exchange of information. This makes sense given the historic bias within the USA that political freedom follows.

But that benign behavior now seems to be shifting with the U.S. government increasingly acting according to the commercial interests of large corporations. The recent shutdown of torrent sites is only the beginning. There really is no due process here, and whenever governments seize the power to do good by arbitrary means, that power rapidly becomes more and more subject to abuse. "Doing good" becomes anyone's opinion, and he who has the power plug in his hand wins. Such is the case with the internet.

The other  thing that is happening, though, is that the power of computers in the hands of everyday people is also exploding. Today I have more computing power in my telephone than existed in an entire building when the current internet architecture was being designed.

The first step was taken by the Bit Torrent people.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-based-dns-to-counter-us-domain-seizures-101130/
They are working to develop a decentralized DNS that will eliminate the single point of vulnerability.

This technology is going to spread, and eventually we will have an internet composed of a TRUE web of peer-to-peer connections, with no ability for central control. And what warms my heart is that there isn't any way anyone can stop it.