"Is this the end or beginning?" Betjeman put those words into the mouth of Oscar Wilde as he sat in the Cadogan hotel waiting to be arrested for sexual offences in 1895. Similar thoughts must have flitted through the mind of Julian Assange as he prepared to present himself at a London police station yesterday. He was duly arrested in relation to alleged sex offences in Sweden and remanded in custody for a week. Under technological, legal, financial, corporate and governmental attack from all sides, Assange has managed to keep his subversive website, WikiLeaks, staggering on, spilling classified secrets around the globe. Will WikiLeaks be floored by the arrest of its driving inspiration? Or will its actions, ethos and notoriety prove it to be indestructible and thereby demonstrate that there are new forces in the world which can effectively challenge established patterns of power and control of information? Is it the end or the beginning?

Of the charges themselves it is unwise to say anything. The internet is awash with conspiracies, smears and rebuttal, but for the moment it is best to let the Swedish judicial process take its course. It is, though, difficult to see what purpose is served by locking Assange away this week, given that a number of reputable people were prepared to stand surety for his bail. The best way of demonstrating that the charges have nothing to do with silencing WikiLeaks is to let it carry on leaking while Assange faces his accusers.

Diplomatic confidences

But, 10 days into the disclosures, a number of questions about the way the world has changed are becoming more clearly framed. The first concerns diplomacy itself. Should diplomats be able to speak confidentially with their governments and sources?

The answer is, clearly, yes. Without secret communication there could be no meaningful diplomacy and textured communication between countries. But at least two further issues immediately come into play. Diplomatic sources deserve protection, too – and it is apparent that the US government must rapidly reconsider the way it exposed the confidences of sensitive sources to a potential audience of millions of Americans cleared to read "secret" material. And if American diplomats must troop around TV studios citing the Vienna convention, which protects diplomatic embassies and communications as "inviolate", then they must do a better job of explaining why Hillary Clinton was recently sending out demands on behalf of the CIA to spy on foreign envoys at the UN and around the world. If the sanctity of the diplomatic bag is to mean anything, it must be a universal value.

The implications of the WikiLeaks disclosures for vast government databases are considerable. The confidential medical records of more than 50 million UK citizens will soon be sitting on a centralised £12bn computer system which can be accessed by as many as 250,000 NHS staff from 30,000 terminals. The NHS Spine is, essentially, no different from Siprnet, the military intranet at the heart of these leaks. The vision of a 22-year-old private soldier reading – and allegedly copying – the innermost secrets of US diplomacy is hardly a reassuring one.

Alarmist predictions

The general principle of confidential information comes into conflict with freedom of expression issues the moment such material is leaked. That is not to argue that it is right to "dump" all the American cables for the whole world to read. It is plainly not. They need to be handled with care and a responsible eye on the possible damage to individuals and operations. WikiLeaks may have erred in some of its judgments over where the precise line should be drawn – but, in general, alarmist predictions of the sky falling in following publication of war logs and cables have failed to materialise. Mr Assange is accused of being relentlessly anti-American. But, for some years, he ploughed a rather lonely furrow publishing material which embarrassed corrupt and repressive governments elsewhere – an enterprise not dissimilar in its intent to organisations such as Transparency International, which is generously supported by the US government. Instead of wholesale condemnation of the leaks, it is more fruitful to look at the individual stories that are emerging and judge each on its importance and the public interest served. The anti-cable camp has veered from predicting harm to a metropolitan shrug that they tell us nothing new. Neither charge is right. In particular, countries with repressive governments and without a free press have a great hunger to read what their rulers have been saying and doing. We should not sneer at the opportunity these cables offer.

It is true that some of the dispatches confirmed what we already knew: that there was deep animosity between the Arab Gulf states and their Iranian neighbour, for instance, or that the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, sat astride a virtual mafia state. Some stories broke new ground – the CIA instructions to spy on the UN being one example. China's willingness to see the Korean peninsula reunited under a government in Seoul changed the way we saw an old conflict; and the revelation that a senior Chinese official had co-ordinated the assault on Google took that story into new territory. Yemen's private willingness to admit that US bombs were their bombs, and the extent to which the US had lost control of policy in Pakistan, also opened eyes.

Closer to home, the "special relationship" has taken some dents. US criticism of the performance of British troops in Sangin, the cockpit of the Afghan insurgency, caused palpable anger among British soldiers, particularly as the US are themselves starting to take heavy losses in Helmand. This can only increase the estrangement of public opinion to the war. It was instructive to learn that the US had been given assurances that the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war would not reveal anything damaging to US interests.

A fragile web

What of the internet itself? What many people had thought was a resilient web – a communications network that could "route around censorship" – has, after all, a few points where failure, whether technical or political, stifles communication. The ironies hardly need spelling out. For a powerful argument of the potential of the beneficial power of the web, go no further than Mrs Clinton's powerful January 2010 speech on internet freedom in which she lauded the "iconic infrastructure of our age", adding this warning: "As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools." She meant Iran and China, but there is widespread unease at the tactics her own administration is using to stifle WikiLeaks into silence.

The academic Clay Shirky has blogged persuasively this week that the US government should openly use the law against WikiLeaks and others rather than muscle. "Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it's OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn't prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow." We agree.