Why would BofA pick a "let them eat cake" strategy? The timing certainly couldn't have been better for the Occupy Wall Street folks. They seized on the debit card fees, and feeling the pressure, BofA nixed its plan earlier this week. Chase, Wells Fargo and others also canceled plans to charge debit-card fees. The protesters have vowed to close accounts with fee-charging institutions, designating November 5 as "Bank Transfer Day."

Occupy Wall Street may have started small, but it spread like a brush fire. The first protests sprang up in New York, then quickly spread to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. According to OccupyTogether.org, "meetups" are currently taking place in more than 1,500 cities.

The similarities between Zuccotti Park and Tahrir Square are striking: people living in tents for weeks; peaceful protests occasionally turning violent; demonstrations spreading to other cities; an upper class unable to empathize with the frustrations of the protesters; anger at a privileged group that receives favorable treatment from the government; the dismissal of the disaffected as a radical fringe group; and a protest empowered by the Internet.

What surprises me most is Wall Street's failure to appreciate the power of the Internet. If you make a great proportion of your profits by leveraging the Internet in the financial world, why wouldn't you be concerned about others using its leverage to spread their frustrations?

It's the Internet that the financial world has to thank for the explosion of financial services industry and its ability to generate immense profits. Without the Internet it would be impossible to trade $4 trillion in currencies every day; high-frequency trading, which now accounts for almost two-thirds of stock trading volume, could not exist without Internet-facilitated information flows.

So what lessons should Wall Street have learned about Internet-driven protests from Tahrir Square and its own experiences with the Internet?

First, in a highly connected environment, even a small group can spread an economic or thought contagion. Wall Street firms, as well as most citizens, were victims of the financial contagions that spread throughout the world economy during the 2008 Financial Crisis. As Timothy Geithner recently observed, "This interconnectedness is not a trivial issue; even a relatively small country could threaten the world financial system."

What's true for a small country could be true for a small group.

The second lesson is that the little people -- let's call them the $5-a-month people -- now have a powerful collective voice. Regis McKenna, the Silicon Valley public relations guru, once told me, "Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel."

The little guys are now leveraging barrels of virtual ink, while directing the application of the real ink as well. According to a Pew report, recent anti-Wall Street protests accounted for 7 percent of news coverage -- almost twice the level of coverage devoted to the war in Afghanistan.