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From the ancient world of Theory we know why people invent foundational myths: to protect those in power (in this case US-American IT firms and their academic-military science structures that are losing global hegemony). The Zittrain myth says that, compared to centralized, content-controlled systems such as AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, the ‘generative’ Internet of the late 1980s was an open network. But this was simply not the case, it was closed to the general public. [..] The first decades the Internet was a closed world, only accessible to (Western) academics and the U.S. military. In order to access the Internet one had to be an academic computer scientist or a physicist. Until the early nineties it was not possible for ordinary citizens, artists, business or activists, in the USA or elsewhere, to obtain an email address and make use of the rudimentary UNIX-based applications. Remember, this was the period between, roughly speaking, 1987 and 1993
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2008/10/12/zittrains-foundational-myth-of-the-open-internet/

Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. Jonathan Zittrain points out that the ‘ever-increasing usability [of Web 2.0]has been accompanied by the deliberalising of user rights’. To believe that competitive pressures will lead providers to offer more freedoms is like expecting the commercialisation of news to improve the quality of reporting. ‘Mass amateurisation’ ~ racing car driving is difficult, so we have professionals for whom driving is not a means but an end; driving a normal car is so easy that amateurs can do it while trying to achieve other things. Activist academics who like to think of themselves as progressives yet covet their positions as consultants to conservative business and government ~ Self-censorship at work. The total absence of controversial issues creates the narrow scope typical of books written by consultants.
http://www.metamute.org/en/content/analysis_without_analysis