Schneier: "In the coming years we're seeing a lot more power struggles play out on the internet."

From an interview with Vice, Bruce Schneier speculates about how power struggles will play out on the internet in the coming years:

The internet is interesting because it really changes so many things. When the internet was born, there was this belief that it would vastly change the power structure. There's a great quote from John Perry Barlow in the mid-'90s at the World Economic Forum, and he basically says the governments of the world have no business on the internet, that have no power over the internet. You can't legislate it. The internet is it's own thing. It's a really utopian way of looking at the world, but we believed it. We believed the internet would change the world, would give power to the powerless. And it did, for many years. The ability to organize, to coordinate—it made so many things different.

And that changed recently. Governments discovered the internet. So now we're seeing that in China, for example, the internet is a tool of social control, and now both sides are using the internet. The Syrian dissidents are using the internet to organize, the Syrian government uses the internet to round up dissidents. That interplay between the institutionally powerful—the governments and corporations—and the distributively powerful—dissident groups, criminals, and hackers. How they both use the internet to increase their power, how they use the internet against each other, I think is fascinating. It's something that we need to look at. In the coming years we're seeing a lot more power struggles play out on the internet. And I'm just curious how that's gonna end up—it's not at all obvious.