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Politics have been changed forever because of people. The Internet is one of the tools that has helped. And it isn't just politics. The new networked dynamics that are now possible with these new forms of communication are also changing the way people engage as consumers that demand more social value from corporations.

The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks - upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics - is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age.

By 2007, we were finally living in a culture where people get what networks are and what technology can do to connect people.

In the future, 'the networked' will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves.

The landscape of the Net has changed; that cyberfrontier of the past has become a teeming city of people, transactions, and businesses.

The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.

The message I'm trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology - they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.

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.

Today, for the first time - and the Obama campaign showed us this - we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one.

The world is changing, and the Internet is about to become the next broadcast network.