Academic says gadgets threaten Internet's future

"The community itself exercises a form of self-restraint and policing," he said. "You see it in Britain when you try to jump a queue, you see it on Wikipedia when a page is vandalised.

"The challenge to the technologists is to build technologies to let people of good faith help without having to devote their lives to it."

* The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, futureoftheinternet.org , is published by Penguin.

(Editing by Steve Addison)