Over the last three decades the Internet has evolved into
something unprecedented in the human experience: the first
many-to-many mass medium. It bypasses and undermines
the centralisation and concentration of information flow and
empowers individual freedom of expression at the expense of
government control and mass media gatekeepers. Power,
especially concentrated power, is rarely relinquished
willingly. Over the next decade, a collection of technologies
in various states of development and deployment, promoted as
solutions to clamant problems of the present-day Internet, pose
the risk of “putting the Internet genie back in the bottle”.
The Digital Imprimatur explores these
technologies, describes how they can, and are, being promoted
and adopted, and assesses the perils they pose to liberty and
the Internet as we know it. Whether the Internet continues to
empower and enrich the lives of an ever-growing global audience
or becomes something very different indeed is likely to be
decided in the next decade; The Digital Imprimatur
sounds a cautionary note of what the future may hold if the
present course is maintained.