Increasing numbers of people are going online via a smartphone. In doing so, they might be helping to do away with a free – in every sense – internet

If a maven is, as Wikipedia maintains, "a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others", then Mary Meeker is definitely a maven. She started her professional career as a stockbroker at Salomon Brothers, but then morphed into an early version of a technology analyst at Morgan Stanley. Since this firm was the lead manager for the IPO of Netscape in August 1995, which triggered the first internet boom, one might say that she was present at the Creation.

As the boom gathered its frenzied pace, Meeker and a colleague published a slide presentation labelled "The Internet Report", which became the nearest thing the nascent information-starved industry had to a statistics bible and ensured Meeker's place in its hall of fame. Publication of the slide deck became an annual event.

Ms Meeker is now a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Silicon Valley's poshest venture capital firm, but she's still doing her thing. I've been wading through her latest "Internet Trends" report, which is an updated version of the one she published in May and has lots of intriguing statistics, some of which have pretty sobering implications.

We will get to the implications in a moment, but first let's consider some of the numbers. Meeker estimates that 2.4 billion people are now using the net, which is a shade over a third of the world's population. Overall, the number of internet users is growing at 8% a year, but in some countries (Iran, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Colombia, for example) the growth rates are much higher than that.

But it's when one sees how all these people access the net that the data leap into life. Meeker claims that the world now has 1.1 billion smartphone users, ie people who can access the internet and use the web via a handheld device. This trend is reinforced by other developments. A third of US adults now own a tablet or e-reader (up from 2% less than three years ago). And Apple's iPad is the fastest-selling mobile device of all time (which, in the internet world, means "until the next Big Thing"). There's a serious trend here.

The really staggering figures, however, are those relating to how people use their mobile devices. They already account for 13% of all internet traffic. This year, 24% of all online shopping on "black Friday" in the US was done via mobiles (up from 6% two years ago). And Meeker claims that in May this year mobile internet traffic in India overtook PC-based traffic.

What do these statistics mean? Well, basically they imply that the future's mobile. We're heading for a world in which most people will access the internet via handheld devices – phones and tablets. And this is a really big deal. On the one hand, it will make it easy for billions of people to integrate the net into their daily lives, with all the benefits that that can bring. On the other hand, it will greatly enhance the powers of corporations that few of us have any reason to trust.

Why? Well, mobile devices are radically different from PCs because they are essentially closed, tethered devices that are to a greater (Apple) or lesser (Android) extent controlled either by their manufacturers or those who supply their operating systems. Nothing goes on an Apple device, for example, that hasn't been explicitly authorised by Apple. Moreover, access to the net from a mobile device is also mediated by another set of corporate control-freaks: the mobile network operators (aka telcos).

So one implication of a mobile-dominated world is massive enhancement of the power of large corporations to control both the pace of innovation and what users do (and pay for) on the net. The consequences for innovation have been well articulated by scholars such as Jonathan Zittrain and Tim Wu and so need not detain us here.

The possibilities of telco control are only just becoming apparent – in Dubai of all places, where the World Conference on Information Technology is currently underway. There's been much understandable concern about threats to freedom of speech etc implicit in the conference, but many people see the biggest threat coming from a proposal by the telcos to meter and charge users for the internet content they relay through their electronic pipes.

In the early days of mobile phones, one network had a slogan: "The future's bright, the future's Orange." An updated version might be: "The future's mobile, the future's bleak."