It’s true that many forward-thinking organizations are becoming more transparent, and the borders between them are becoming less distinct. Still, eliminating the firewall altogether would require a lot of infrastructure changes. For one thing, until IPv6 is implemented worldwide, there simply aren’t enough IP addresses for everyone. Network address translation (NAT) makes the computers inside the corporate network opaque to outsiders.

An even bigger challenge is the political one. Changing the Internet from a “network of networks” paradigm to a “unified network” approach would require far more coordination than most companies — and countries — would be willing to undertake.

But I agree that the presence of company firewalls in the first place is an unspoken assumption of mine. Maybe it should be item #3 in my Enterprise 2.0 distortion field?

There is a balance of personal employee value and system organization focus needed with these tools and services. Sadly, much of the selling of the product is to people who only see the systems organization benefits, without any grasp that the tools will have limited adoption, long term engagement by employees, and therefore limited value to the organization if the employee value focus is not perceived. The employee value is much harder and complicated to grasp and the tools have to do a much better job at embracing how humans are social (their needs, fears, concerns, and various understandings of these dynamics as 1-to-1 social, small group, large group, and whole organization social interaction needs from the perspective of the person sharing information).