So what, if anything, should we do about all these budding monopolists? The prevailing attitude among regulators over the past decade has been: very little. One reason is that firms don’t always know how to transform the network effects they’ve been creating into empire-entrenching profits. Microsoft’s approach—charging for its software—is not open to most of today’s firms, at least not at first. To build a network big enough to exploit, you usually need to offer something for free. So we get lots of “freemium” businesses that charge only heavy users. We get Apple, which has learned to build networks around music and movies and apps, but makes most of its money selling the devices that access those networks. We get Amazon, which is building similar networks around books and other media, and is selling its devices for no profit. And we get Google and Facebook, which have such staggering numbers of users that they are able, by smart targeting, to make serious money selling ads—although so far they’ve had less success with ads on mobile devices than on computers. With the situation so dynamic and uncertain, we may be tempted just to shrug and let the market take us where it will.

But to assume that this hyperfast Schumpeterian capitalism is the new normal, and that government or civic action can only get in the way, is to ignore or misread history. (If you need to do some remedial reading, as I did, I recommend Tim Wu’s The Master Switch and Richard R. John’s Network Nation.) We have repeatedly seen new communications technologies go from open and chaotic to closed and, in many cases, censored. This happened with newspapers, radio, TV, movies, even the telephone system. Just because the Internet has succeeded in blowing up some of these established communications monopolies and oligopolies doesn’t mean it won’t create its own.

Declaring that the new utilities of the Internet age thus require regulation can be problematic. As Wu puts it, “Regulation is often a way to keep a dominant firm in place.” At this stage, a set of rules on how search engines are supposed to work would probably just entrench Google. But other tools are available. We can, for example, agree on principles of how the online world should develop. The best-known of these is “network neutrality”—the idea, coined by Wu, that broadband providers shouldn’t be allowed to favor some Internet businesses over others. Still incipient is the principle, espoused by the open-source advocate Doc Searls and others, that customer data should belong to customers rather than to retailers, social networks, search engines, and the like. Third-party providers should store your information, and share it only when you want them to. This would lower your switching costs, and could upend the business models of Google, Facebook, and others that profit from hoarding user data. It might also deliver a better consumer experience at a lower cost.