Remember the days when we used to speak of the Internet as a great liberating force in the distribution of information?

I remember quite succinctly being in a lecture in which my moderate anarchist professor enthused for two hours on the possibilites of subverting major corporations and sending coded messages to comrades from PC to PC. In giving us a practical example he had (at great admin costs to the university) set up a computer connected to a projector which was to show how this great network would help bring about a transformation in modern political life. Two clicks of the mouse, he said, would be all it takes to form communities the likes of which the world had never seen before. He clicked the mouse twice. Instead of taking us to his intended site (Cursor if I remember correctly) the computer defaulted. A few seconds later and we were all staring up at the voluptuous cat-suited body of an 'Oops! I Did It Again'-era Britney Spears. Underneath it said "Pepsi - The Choice of a New Generation". Was this the brave new world the Internet was heralding; one in which just one keystroke can divert attention from genuine left wing concern to crass mass consumerism in an instant? This was the first time I had doubts about the power of the Internet. It would not be the last.

This week I logged onto the BBC Radio 4 web site to respond to messages left on the Today programme message board. After dutifully registering my details I was presented with a small box in which to write a message. Beneath this space sat three curious "Golden Rules" - one of which was: "No e-mail addresses or web addresses". Must just be that they've had problems in the past I assumed, it can't be that the BBC - the BBC I pay for - wants to stop people from expressing a preference for other news services. Or can it? A friend of mine in the music industry often conducts research on his subject by visiting the message boards of MTV - this gives him a good feel for the current mood of the market. He told me that MTV have a similar policy which can actually lead to legal action if transgressed. That is, if you sign up to the MTV message board service you legally promise not to promote the web site of, say, VH1. NBC, CNN ditto. In fact, almost every chat room and message board hosted by a large corporation now forbids voluntary redirection by any registered member. I know this because the other day, whilst chatting in Yahoo!, I was ejected for asking someone to check out The Onion web site. Unbelievably, this happened in a private messaging session.

Of course, you'll say, you'd be a fool not to expect large corporations to try and prevent business being taken away from them. But the consequences are more sinister than that; these corporations now act as ideologues themselves - censoring anything that may affect their own brand image and thus controlling discourse that should, legally at least, be relatively unmetered. Someone directed me the other day from MSN to www.edgeyourself.com and was promptly disconnected. This latter site is something of an enigma itself; a mail to its e-mail address sends back a cryptic auto-response - it invites communication and then spurns it in favour of confusion. Still, this is a damn site more interesting than attempting not to mention that there are more interesting things going on at channel4.co.uk rather than at bbc.co.uk, or that VH1 plays better videos than MTV. Because the way things are going a personal preference might land you in court, or, even worse, prison.