However you look at it, the date is now very near, and in its 40 years of existence the Internet has changed our lives forever. However, as AP's Anick Jesdanun notes, if you look at its last couple of years, the Internet - once flying almost solely on enormous enthusiasm of everyone involved - is now definitely going through a crisis, perhaps somewhat obscured by the shiny new tools at our disposal.
On one hand, you have the evident rise of social media and social networks, which are becoming an essential part - the meat around the bones, if you will - of the Internet. Twitter and Facebook don't really enable you to do anything you couldn't have done before with old protocols and services such as IRC, but they focus on you - the person - and they make it easier than ever to share and to connect with other people. To us who follow these new tools and write about them daily, it feels like a wonderful revolution.
The Internet is, however, today also plagued by countless problems. Uneven standards, censorship in many countries, countless lawsuits and the subsequent ostracizing of sharing content altogether, net neutrality issues, and finally, copyright issues that are fueling stricter - often way too strict - laws which are towering over our online freedoms.
All of these are causing a fragmentation of the Internet that might have long lasting consequences, especially for the developing countries. Remember when Internet was about sharing everything with everyone? Look at services such as Veoh, Hulu, Pandora: if you happen to be living in the wrong part of the globe, these don't work for you. It's getting harder and harder to connect and to share on the Internet. In China, the country where the iPhone is made, people are still waiting to be able to buy an iPhone. When they do, they won't be able to access the same websites; they won't get the same search results, and various online services will behave differently or won't work at all.