The big effect which I still haven't mentioned and the one that worries me most is what the corporate world is telling us they have in mind. And what they are telling us they have in mind is taking the whole thing over and using it as a technique of domination and control. In fact, nation and state are often irrelevant in the formation and conduct of online communities.
Intellectual properties flow freely across the Net, knowing no borders.
What's more, all this is happening at a time when intellectual properties represent a greater and greater portion of both human industry and the global economy. In its current form, the Internet clearly does expand the ability of people with minimal resources to originate communication as well as to receive it. More generally, the new era of digital communications has the potential to end the old scarcity of bandwidth in the radio spectrum that limited the number of broadcast channels. But there are also powerful forces favoring concentrated power in the new era of communications, and it would be a mistake just to rely on technology and the marketplace to curb abuses of that power. Unfortunately, cyberspace is shaping up to be more like Cyberbia than Cyberkeley.