From a really good boingboing interview that Avi Solomon conducted with Kevin Kelly:

“Kevin Kelly: I would say over the long-term that humans cannot really influence the direction of technology and I would say that there are certain inevitabilities in the progression of technologies. What we can influence is the character of the technologies.

So I would say that the web, a web was inevitable, in that as long as we were producing things, that if we rewound history to the same start point, same conditions, and let it run, that you would keep getting the web at some relative point in the sequence. And that if you were to do an intergalactic survey of all the planets of the universe that had civilizations that all of them would also go through a moment when they connected everything to everything. That is inevitable. But what kind of internet, what kind of web they make is not inevitable. The character, whether it was open or closed, national or transnational, non-profit or commercial, based on this protocol or that protocol, those things are not at all inevitable, and those are political, entrepreneurial and market decisions we make. And they make a huge difference to us. So the kind of system we have is a choice that we have.”