WIRED:IN TORONTO THIS week, I sat with what they like to call "multiple stakeholders" and we talked about the future of the internet, as you do. It was called a Cyberdialogue, kindly hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and what we concentrated on was the topic of the "stewardship of cyberspace" – which is to say, who exactly should be making sure that the internet should continue to work and, well, not implode, potentially taking our civilisation with it.

Around the table were representatives from businesses like Google and ATT, political think-tanks, an EU lawmaker, NGOs like Human Rights Watch, and military advisers to the US and Canadian governments. At dinner, I sat between a chap from the FBI, an employer of a Dutch ISP and a man who works for Microsoft on global strategy. We got on rather well.

I don’t know about you, but when I read sentences like that in the newspaper (and I’m not in them), I get a deeply sinking feeling. As Adam Smith said: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

It doesn’t much help when you sprinkle into the mix the military and a few non-profits. From the outside, the whole thing smacks of a kind of cyber-Davos, or a sinister Bohemian Grove of those plotting to take control of the net.

Of course, I could tell you that it’s all fine, and nothing eldritch or untoward went on – but I’m part of the conspiracy, am I not? That’s exactly what I would say.

I wonder how many of these meetings are going on at one time. There are a lot of people constantly worrying about the internet these days. I counted five minutes before somebody used the phrase “critical infrastructure”. The military types were happy to declare that the internet was under attack. Politicians said the internet needed to be more democratically managed. NGOs warned of the growing power of internet businesses.

Rather than a power grab, it seemed like each group was trying to egg the other on to take a bit more responsibility. Melissa Hathaway, who was director of the joint Cyber Task Force under George Bush, wanted ISPs to step up to the task and start throwing cyber criminals off their networks.

Network engineers, feeling the glare of the rest of the room on them, wanted individual net users to take a bit more responsibility, and law enforcement to give them a little more help. Law enforcement wanted the diplomats to sort out better ways for them to co-operate against international networks of criminals.

Everyone wanted to share the responsibility. Mostly with the others in the room.

One of the things I rather like, and still like about the internet is that it’s a creation that still sits a million miles away from the great and the good. Al Gore notwithstanding, no state or business would have planned this network to be the “critical infrastructure” of the 21st century.

The engineers worry about its fragility, the military worry about its vulnerability to “cyber attacks”. It’s filled with unlawful content, and we’re all “one click away from fraud” as Hathaway bemoaned. Huge swathes of the traffic is used for porn or piracy. There’s still no-one in charge.

And yet, it thrives. In fact, it’s persisted through two decades of very great and very good people threatening that it would collapse at any moment, and struggling to keep it online, and desperately looking around for someone to take control, and muttering that perhaps they would.

But it remains a slippery beast. Right now, there are very few levers of centralised power with which to wrestle control of the internet. I understand if that is discomfiting, and it certainly provokes intense and furrowed cyber dialogues among those whose job is to protect and defend us all.

Speaking personally, I rather hope it continues that way. I fear that it won’t.

That future has nothing to do with the well-natured attendees at the Cyberdialogue. The infrastructure of the internet is changing underneath us all. Instead of a hodgepodge of independent ISPs, cobbled-together PCs and deregulated broadband chaos, the next iteration of the internet will go through dedicated smartphones, a handful of high-speed mobile data connections, and telcos with a long tradition of cosy relations with local governments.

Those telcos will be collecting centrally a profound amount of information on us all via our locked-down devices and their monopoly-provided celltowers – what we read, where we are, who we meet, and who exactly we are. Such giant telcos had almost a century of complicity with states in handing that data over. No matter how much we talk about who should be in charge of the net in the 21st century, it is they who will be in charge.

It will fall neatly into their hands. When it does, I doubt they’ll attend many meetings to chat to share that power.