As you know (or should know), yesterday was the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web. To commemorate the occasion, billionaire D.C. startup investor and ex-AOL CEO Steve Case wrote a charming and compelling guest post for Mashable in which he recalls his past with the Internet and where he believes it will go next – what he calls the "third wave."

When Case helped found AOL in 1985, he was fond of a book called The Third Wave. In it, Alvin Toffler described how the agricultural age begat the industrial revolution, and he predicted that would spur a future electronic revolution – a third wave. He was right.

Case theorizes that in terms of the Internet, we are now entering a similar third wave.

"The first wave, in the 1980s and 90s, was building the Internet infrastructure and getting people connected," he wrote, while sparing no detail of how this all related to AOL, and how his company was the bomb-dot-com. "The second wave of companies built services on those platforms. This led to the emergence of a new generation of second wave companies, including Google and Amazon — and the reemergence of some, particularly Apple. This, in turn, powered the social media revolution, enabling Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others to grow rapidly. And it unleashed the app economy, a phenomenon that has powered a range of recent successes including Whatsapp and Instagram."

That brings us up to current times. But what comes next? He says the momentum of the Internet is going to shift.

"Instead of building the Internet, as we saw in the first wave, or building on the Internet, which characterized the second wave, the third wave will be about integrating the Internet throughout," he wrote. "Not to mention, it will shake up major industries, such as education and health care, in the process."

In a sense, he's saying Internet will becomes so widespread and universal that its very presence will become an afterthought, much like the electricity that we use to power our homes. As he puts it, Internet will become more powerful than ever, but "increasingly invisible."

Immediately, this brings to mind the Internet of Things and how the interconnected digital world is being brought to otherwise individual physical items to form an ecosystem. But to Case, it means more than that – disruption in majorly regulated industries.

"It will be more of an evolution," he said. "These are complex problems that will require not just technologies, but a web of partnerships. Collaboration and alliances will become as important in this third wave as viral apps were in the second. This change will require an enterprise mentality. And, like it or not, entrepreneurs will need to learn to respect and work with governments. And governments will weigh in on sensitive policy issues like security and privacy."

He doesn't mention D.C., but he sure sounds like someone who's spent a lot of time in the D.C. tech community in that last statement. And he's right in his logic. First the Internet was built up, and then tech companies took advantage of its growth. But now it's time to spread it out and integrate the rest, and along the way, that's going to require some major reform to policy. And no other community has the proximal advantage that D.C. does being home to all that policy change.

Image via Wikipedia