Gina Bianchini: When you look at the history of any new medium, it takes a decade or more for people to figure out what the native behavior of that medium is. For the first 15 years of television, they were actually filming radio shows. And it really took 10 to 20 years to start seeing native TV programming like the Today show, which nobody thought was going to be successful because people didn’t watch television the first thing in the morning. What’s becoming very, very clear—and really why we started Ning—was when you look at what the fundamental or native behavior of what the Internet is, it’s social. It is two-way communication.

Unlike a MySpace, which really came out of this concentrated L.A. music-and-hot-chick scene, or Facebook, which came out of a dorm at Harvard, what’s been interesting about Ning is that we basically have this service and this platform that we throw out there and say, Hey, anybody can create whatever social network they want and spread it virally through invitations and sharing and embeddable widgets and things like that.

I wouldn’t consider it crazy to say that there will be millions of social networks. They will be for every conceivable purpose in every conceivable country. Today, we have registered users in 220 countries. Forty-six percent of our traffic is outside the United States.

In 2007, CNN partnered with YouTube to create the “YouTube Debates,” which allowed computer users to upload questions for the candidates—one indication of the Internet’s increasing grip on American politics. Howard Dean won’t publicly say which candidate is the most Internet-savvy, but the answer is Barack Obama. Chuck Todd is the political director of NBC News and the former editor of the political Web site the Hotline.

Chuck Todd: Obama basically is Dean 2.0, and like any successful 2.0, sometimes you actually have to rename the entire software. Microsoft got rid of the Windows, called it XP. Now we call it Obama rather than Dean. The Internet was Obama’s only path—he had to be successful doing it this way, because the party, the old-school party infrastructure, was behind the brand name Clinton. He had to figure out how to expand the electorate. He had to figure out how to change the rules, and to change the rules he had to figure out how to create this technological marvel that is the Obama campaign.

The other thing the Obama people understand is that to make the Internet work you have to close your eyes and say, O.K., I’m going to let something like that go. You’ve got to be willing to not have centralized control.

VIII: The Last Word

The underpinnings of the Internet trace back in part to concerns about national security. In October of this year the nation’s newest military endeavor, the United States Air Force Cyber Command, is set to commence operations. The command will employ a force of 8,000—mostly tech-savvy civilians such as physicists, computer scientists, and electrical engineers. Major General William Lord is the commander.

Major General William Lord: There are cyber-terrorists, there are cyber-criminals, and potentially there are even nation-states. I don’t happen to view the nation-states as the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I think that the cyber-terrorists and the cyber-criminals are much more problematic. The fact that a 12-year-old in the Philippines can affect global markets with the release of one virus, all of a sudden it’s kind of a wake-up call.

We don’t want to be in the middle of monitoring the Internet. What we have been focusing on in the air force is really the defense of our networks, the defense of our ability to use the entire electromagnetic spectrum to conduct air-force operations. As you see in some of our ads, we show you a Predator flying over a combatant area that is being controlled from the United States—that’s a long, long thin thread that we need to be able to protect. It’s a worldwide operation that’s in air and space and terrestrial networks. It connects 500,000 people together, and probably 3,000 aircraft, and an untold number of spacecraft.

Vinod Khosla: Communication always changes society, and society was always organized around communication channels. Two hundred years ago it was mostly rivers. It was sea-lanes and mountain passes. The Internet is another form of communication and commerce. And society organizes around the channels.

Paul Baran: At the beginning there was a different attitude than today. Now everyone is concerned about making money, or reputation. It was different then. We all wanted to help one another. There was no competition, really, on most things. It was a total open flow of information. There were no games. There are so many others who did equally good work, and their names are just forgotten. We were all a bunch of young whippersnappers.

Bob Metcalfe: It was nerd city.

Keenan Mayo is an editorial associate at Vanity Fair.

Peter Newcomb is a Vanity Fair senior articles editor.