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When I was born, the Internet was barely two years old. It was the preserve of academics, used to connect dozens rather than billions of users. There weren't many who predicted it would transform our world.

When I hear people express extreme optimism about the Internet, I say, we've had it in mature form for about ten years. Macroeconomically speaking, those are about the worst 10 years we've had since about the 1930s. I don't blame the Internet for that - that would be ridiculous.

That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.

Here's the thing: I fell impossibly in love with the Internet from the minute I saw it in action in the early 1990s. From that moment on, I have studied it, analyzed it, reported on it, and, mostly, have not been without it as a part of my daily life since.

Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.

It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money.

When it broke out in the mid 1990s, the web was society's first at-scale digital artifact. It spread in orders of ten, first thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of pages - and on it went, to the billions it now encompasses.

If there was no Internet, my career would have ended in 1995.

From early on... we really looked at the Internet as a whole new way to provide storytelling and entertainment.

Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.