In Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky, there is a line (which Google can't seem to find) something like this: "Any ubiquitous network on which local nodes are compelled to run government code inevitably devolves into tyranny." It sounds like a very dangerous slippery slope to start down.
I remain surprised that Vinge does not appear -- to my limited knowledge -- to get the same attention that some other SF masters do. His works are excellent, particularly "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky".
We need to switch the global namespace from being 'human meaningful' to 'secure' (on Zooko's triangle) and then use something like Petnames to provide human meaningful names to end users.
There are a lot of bad things on the Internet: spam, child porn, malware, phishing and so on.
You know, I'm actually quite fine with the government not getting involved with my spam, malware, and phishing problems. I don't really want to get into the Child Porn witch hunt, but pretty much everyone is capable of self regulating there, too.
Pretty soon we're going to need things like Tor just to get a clean end-end IP connections between hosts.
We need to strengthen our crypto laws now before lawmakers realize that in order to continue their self-given rights to continue nannying they need short keys and escrow.
