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This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.

Take the open access movement, which has campaigned to ensure that scientific articles are freely available to the public, who ultimately paid for the research with their taxes. Historically, most scientific writing was confined to expensive scholarly journals and essentially available only to people with university affiliations. Some publishers resisted the open access movement, but trends are against them. In March this year, for example, the US Congress made permanent a requirement that all research funded by the National Institutes of Health be openly accessible, and other countries are following. Within a decade or two, it is safe to say that all scientific literature will be online, free and searchable. Journal publishers will still be paid, but at a different point in the chain.

• Today Cisco announced the results of the Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast and Methodology, 2008-2013 that confirms consumer broadband usage and global IP network traffic continues to climb at an overwhelming pace due to new forms and expanded usage of interactive media, and the explosion of video content across multiple devices. The study projects that global IP traffic will increase fivefold by 2013. There are key consumer and service provider implications to the forecast that compares regions around the globe including North America, Western Europe, AsiaPac, Middle East and more.

• Global IP traffic is expected to increase fivefold from 2008 to 2013, approaching 56 exabytes per month in 2013, up from approximately 9 exabytes per month in 2008.

• Consumer Hyperconnectivity, (which includes active digital multitasking and passive networking), increases the "digital day" as IP networks support more and more tasks and functions simultaneously from a host of networked devices (e.g. TV, PC, mobile device, et al.)

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

The internet's network structure is similar to that of the human brain (Image: ImageSource / Getty)