As spam keeps multiplying, it reminds us of the persistence of the original nightmare of the Net as a borderless, centerless anarchy -- a medium in which anyone is free to tell outrageous lies or steal collective resources because, hey, who can stop them? Each new spam is an irritating reminder: This network is out of control.

Except. A couple of weeks ago, in between the spammed "Become your own boss!" and "herbal Viagra" offers, I received a cluster of real e-mail from friends and colleagues, all pointing to the same news blip: "Four Web sites," the headlines read, "control half of surfing time."

My God! Talk about media concentration! Has the entire Web really come down to America Online, Microsoft, Yahoo and Napster?

Of course, look a little more closely at that report and you find all sorts of holes. For starters, there's the notoriously inaccurate methodology of the survey takers at Jupiter Media Metrix. Then there's the definitions of all these terms -- "site," "surfing," "control." Does AOL "control" the time that its users are sending e-mail? Are Napster users "surfing" when they're trading music files? Who assembled this ludicrous data, anyway?

Still, the sound bite touched a nerve because -- whatever the flaws in Jupiter's study -- we know in our guts that control of the Web is concentrating at an alarming rate. Sure, it's still possible for anyone to put up a Web site. But as the carcasses of independent Web start-ups litter the landscape, the once-wild online free-for-all is rapidly devolving into a showdown between AOL and Microsoft. AOL controls the subscriber lists and a huge chunk of the content; Microsoft controls the consumer operating system and browser. Anarchy? No way -- this is a bipolar Cold War, waged with software standards and lawsuits and marketing blitzes.

In fact, the Web today, in this grim summer of 2001 -- seven long years after its first flush of popularity -- faces a paradoxical and perplexing impasse. It's still too anarchic to be made a completely smooth, convenient, ready-for-prime-time experience; but it's also losing the vital ferment of its "let a hundred flowers bloom" youth to the gray monotony of corporate control.

We're reaping the worst of both worlds, networked chaos and monopolistic consolidation. The least common denominator of individual behavior multiplies, while the least common denominator of mass taste prevails.

In other words, we're screwed.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.