There was a speech at RAND a while ago on the development of the Internet. The main points were that information utopia and a new era of personal freedom were almost here, because of the free flow of data along the many distributed networks of the Internet which are accessible to most everybody.
I disagree with this cheery assessment because I think there is a kind of funnel or information diode effect going on. Users logging onto a site are visible, searchable, and ultimately knowable, by both corporations and governments, for purposes ranging from the benign to the annoying to the truly frightening. The organizations doing the observing are not themselves so observable - all the visitor sees is what's on the Web site, while the Web site can get quite a bit of data on the visitor, more if spyware is used. The relative anonymity of organizations and their databases ensures that the information diode flows mainly from people to organizations, not the other way around.
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