Steven Levy posits the Internet of the future in this article in Newsweek:
censorship, surveillance and suppression of the creative impulse. Where
anonymity is outlawed and every penny spent is accounted for. Where the
powers that be can smother subversive (or economically competitive)
ideas in the cradle, and no one can publish even a laundry list without
the imprimatur of Big Brother. Some prognosticators are saying that
such a construct is nearly inevitable. And this infrastructure is none
other than the former paradise of rebels and free-speechers: the
Internet.
Chilling. Levy goes on to describe the downsides of Digital Restriction
Management and TMCA and Microsoft’s Palladium, now renamed “Next
Generation Secure Computing Base.”
Like shopping anonymously in a grocery store (if you don’t use the
store card) or eating at a restaurant without identifying yourself,
there is no justification for broadcasting your digital identity to any
who want to know. Law enforcement can track down your addresses and
electrons and bits should they need to, but every vendor doesn’t have
the right to know everything about you, to be able to turn on or turn
off your access at their whim. We are in a slippery slope where
Internet citizens can lose some of the features that make the internet
the great place that it is.