Will non-profit foundations step up to save the Internet?

[Commentary] The best foundations and philanthropies exist to address market failure, working to solve problems that business and government ignore or make worse. Andrew Carnegie funded public libraries in America. Bill and Melinda Gates are working to save lives in the developing world. The Ford Foundation puts social justice at the core of its programs. Now it's time for our major foundations and philanthropists to address an impending new failure.

They can help save the kinds of open, decentralized systems that gave us personal computing and the Internet. Like a python that suffocates its prey, the forces of centralization -- corporate and governmental -- are inexorably strangling democratized technology and communications. They have power, and they have money, and they're not even slightly interested in allowing tomorrow's technology and communications to be controlled by the users, because that would threaten their power and profits. They don't do this because they necessarily have evil goals. Rather, like the python, it is in their nature.

[Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight center for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite school of journalism and mass communication]