Over the last three decades the Internet has evolved from a research tool linking a handful of elite sites into a global mass medium. Its rapid, and often reactive, evolution has resulted In a present day architecture widely perceived as inadequate to hold users accountable for their actions, providing unwarranted anonymity to disruptive and destructive actors, and placing intellectual property at risk in disregard of applicable law and with impunity to its sanctions. A collection of technologies in various states of design, development, and deployment promises to remedy these perceived shortcomings of the Internet. If implemented and extrapolated to their logical conclusion, the result will be an Internet profoundly different from today's and at substantial variance with the vision of its original designers. More than any innovation in the last century, the Internet empowers individuals to spontaneously teach, learn, explore, communicate, form communities, and collaborate. Measured relatively, this individual empowerment comes at the expense of the power of governments and large commercial enterprises, thereby reversing a trend toward concentration of power more than a century old which has acted to reduce free citizens and productive individuals to mere subjects and consumers.
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