The Internet may be seen as a a radically new form of communication infrastructure; or it may be viewed as a mass medium comparable with telephone, newspapers, video, and so on, and therefore likely to become subject to the same market constraints.

Certainly, Internet communication has some distinguishing features. A piece of information which one Internet user has can be quickly communicated to many others, spread around the world. They, in turn, can respond to that, either connecting back to the sender to tell them that their information is incorrect, for example, or passing it on to others, with their own comments. Thus, one-to-many communication grows over into many-to-many communication.

These features make the Internet more than a set of wires and inter-linked stores of information. It is also a structure within which international communities have grown up and within which particular subcultures have developed.

Longer-established Internet enthusiasts speak of the Internet fostering new models of communication which cannot, or at least should not, be made subject to the laws of commerce. When commercial interests took an active interest in the Web, they sought to harness it to their one-directional approaches. But the considerable effort which went into developing personalised information services using "push" or "pull" techniques to deliver tailored information directly to the individual user brought little or no return.

Electronic mail, the oldest Internet service, has also shown itself to be the most resilient. Those wishing to exploit the Internet for commercial purposes have had to acknowledge that Internet users value the immediacy and interactivity which email offers, and which more controlled forms of communication may not. Precisely because it is anarchic and decentralised, the Internet may always elude complete domination by commercial interests.