SAN FRANCISCO -- Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig warned that today's fast-growing, free-wheeling Internet is threatened by network providers who want to control innovation and commerce on the Internet much the way AT&T once controlled the phone networks.

Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference here, Lessig said society has to decide if it wants to continue down the current path of a "read-only" Internet or embrace what he called a "read/write Internet" with broad access to content and the ability to legally build on the creative works of others.

Lessig did say he wasn't in favor of content being entirely proprietary or entirely free, but he fears the repercussions of the former being the dominant business model.