I don't think the Internet is the problem. Rather, it is an unfortunate catalyst for certain negative effects and serves to amplify others.

One such effect is that many political and legal systems in the West are broken. The general population is apathetic because their voices are so readily ignored by those in power, and special interest groups call the shots. That results in things like an excessively burdensome intellectual property regime, which instead of promoting the development of new ideas and the creation of new products and services by those with meaningful contributions to make, often serves to defend the dying business models of entrenched old players against competition from new players, while in practice offering little benefit to those new players in return because they lack the resources to exploit any advantages they might theoretically have.

Then you combine the resulting culture of resentment by consumers with technology to share creative works instantly, and you not only have a recipe for promoting piracy rather than providing the market with more constructive alternatives that reward the people whose hard work produces things we value (but not enough to bother paying for them, apparently), you also create an over-reaching sense of entitlement in society.

Another negative effect is the kind of education system that we have in many places today where the idea seems to be that no child can be seen to fail, yet it is considered somehow elitist to single out children at the top end of the academic bell curve for any kind of special treatment that would help them to take advantage of their gifts. Here in the UK, for example, we've seen an obvious reduction in the breadth and rigour of exams for at least a generation, and there is a kind of inverse snobbery about selective schools or, worse, schools that charge fees. Of course, those private schools can also use their greater financial resources to employ better educated and trained teachers, provide teaching in smaller groups, and otherwise exploit opportunities to offer a better education to their pupils, but we're supposed to ignore that because if we can't educate all of our children to that standard then damn it we're not going to educate anyone to that standard. Naturally, instead of recognising the obvious flaws in all of this and doing something about it, successive governments and educational institutions seem more concerned with being apologists for the situation, defending this year's school leavers and graduates, and pretending they only tolerate academic high-fliers.

So now we have 50% of the population going to university and, ignoring the significant but still relatively small proportion who now drop out before graduating, every other person has at least a bachelor's degree, and then when they leave university they expect that the same kinds of jobs will be waiting for all of them as were waiting for graduates a generation ago when perhaps 5-10% of the population got the same qualification. The reality is more likely to be a crash course in customer service management with practical training provided in a fast-moving environment (or flipping burgers, as we used to call it). This breeds further resentment, complaints about the high unemployment rate, and so on. Oh, and it also means that many children whose gifts are not academic but who might have made excellent tradesmen or carers or artists or any number of other socially valuable (and often quite financially lucrative, too) roles are pressured into getting certificates that will never be of any real use to them and working 9-5 (sorry, 8-5 or 9-6) in a dead-end office admin job. Did I mention the resentment problem?

There's a whole load more: raising at least one generation with very little respect for anything, the rapid erosion of privacy, the paranoia of governments about anything that might even resemble a possible threat to national security like studying physics, chemistry or engineering, and the list goes on. But this is already a very long post so I won't go into any more areas in detail.

We know these are problems. Our political and legal systems are broken. Our education systems and childcare are broken. Everyone knows these things are broken, and a lot of people have a very clear idea about why, but the system works to prevent those people from getting into positions where they can fix it. And so, instead of encouraging the people with the big ideas to share them, and the people with the practical talents to design better tools and build great new things, and the people with social skills to co-ordinate and encourage all of this, we are breeding new generations who have no concept that anything worth doing requires hard work and commitment, and whose total career aspirations are to climb the middle management ladder as fast as possible (or just to stay alive and out of jail, depending on the luck of the draw).

The Internet didn't cause these problems. It just makes it easier than ever for us to see them, and it provides a stronger incentive than ever for vested interests to clamp down on anyone innovative enough to pose a threat to their bottom line.

The one comfort I have is that the Internet is almost certainly also the way those vested interests will also be brought down eventually. The Powers That Be have all kinds of resources to throw at problems they don't like to make them go away. In contrast, we're only just learning to use grassroots activism, collective funding models, the ability to share knowledge and ideas freely with like-minded people all around the world, and the ability to share educational resources crafted by the smartest educators on the planet, on the kind of scale that the Internet allows. It will take time to understand these things, and to fix the problems that are getting in the way of progress, but there are always going to be enough smart and interested people in the world to sow the seeds of change, and while they may not rise to prominence in politics or business this year or next, in the Internet age there are other ways to get things done. We just haven't learned to get the right people to use them yet.