Most people who use the Internet seem take its nature and characteristics for granted, like we take air and water for granted. Your relationship with air and water -- what you can do with it or within it -- is for all practical purposes an unchanging fact of nature. What you can or cannot do with or on the Internet, however, is the result of specific decisions and actions by individual human beings who hold different motivations -- be they political, cultural, social, academic, economic, or business motives. The actions themselves take different forms: programming, engineering, design, business, or legislative. These decisions and actions determine things like how much privacy you have, how easily your digital activities can be tracked and by whom, how your online identity relates to your offline identity, and to what extent you can have more than one online persona.

The fact that anybody can create their own software programs and use them on the Internet, or plug new devices into the Internet, without having to obtain permission or license from any authority is the result of conscious decisions by the people who first created the Internet: decisions that could have been made differently if those creators -- working mainly in the United States in the late 60's -- had been working in a different political and cultural context.

The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the computer code that led to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990, he did not try to patent or charge fees for the use of his technology. Instead he shared it openly, enabling a rapid expansion of web pages across the Internet, which became the basis for most of the Internet's commercial value, and all kinds of innovation that he couldn't have anticipated.

How the Internet evolves from here on out similarly depends on the choices being made by programmers, engineers, business managers, corporate lawyers, lawmakers in legislatures around the world, regulators, police, military, and national security authorities, activists, investors, consumers and ultimately all technology users. It will favor whoever is most active in shaping it to their liking.

The threats to our digital rights seem to come from a combination of corporations and governments. How are these two sources of control similar and different? How do they relate to one another?

Governance is a way of organizing, amplifying, and constraining power. The point of democratic government is that we give up our rights to do absolutely anything we please at any time to anybody in exchange for order, security, services, and also the protection of the rights of weak or unpopular minorities against majority mob rule. The political processes of modern democracy -- however imperfect -- are supposed to be a way of confirming and re-affirming that government is operating with the people's consent. Constitutions, independent judiciaries, and other structures are supposed to constrain the abuse of power and hold government power accountable. Control that has no basis in the public interest is illegitimate -- although exactly how one defines "public interest" and "legitimate" control is always a matter of passionate debate in a democratic society. In authoritarian states the "public interest" and the control required to maintain it is generally not up for debate in any meaningful way.