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It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression and instead to address the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good and minimize the evil.

Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication are quickly outpacing laws and technology designed to allow for the lawful intercept of communication content.

Experience has shown us that attempts to control the Internet will invariably fail. We should be instructed by the failed efforts of China to regulate political content, the efforts of America to regulate Internet gambling, or the efforts of Australia to regulate certain speech. By its very nature, the Internet will always resist such controls.

There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.

We now have powerful technology, which allows us a voice across boundaries, which was unimaginable at the time of the Greenham Protest, a protest that pre-dates the Internet and the mobile phone.

There's a danger of the Internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention.

Technology has forever changed the world we live in. We're online, in one way or another, all day long. Our phones and computers have become reflections of our personalities, our interests, and our identities. They hold much that is important to us.

The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.

The Internet has become a hate-filled town square with no limits put on destructive verbal behavior.

I am still cautiously hopeful about the potential of the Internet. But it seems that the greatest revolution in communication has been hijacked by commercial values.