http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...ors_picks=true

Will 'Digital Ethnic Cleansing' Be Part of the Internet's Future?

Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, and Steve Clemons discuss the political limitations of the Internet.

And they might ultimately engage, Cohen continued, in a kind of "digital ethnic cleansing." Traditional legal and political checks on mass criminality have been developed within and for the physical world, he noted; in the digital, however, those checks are less developed. The web is simply too new. And you could imagine autocratic regimes or other communities taking advantage of that, creating a scenario in which one group finds a way to, for example, filter another group's content from the web. Or to shut down -- or severely slow down -- their Internet access. Or to infiltrate them with malware and/or orchestrate elaborate denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. One group, in other words, could essentially annihilate the digital existence of another.
When people in the virtual community begin to misbehave, committing crimes that wouldn't be legal in the physical space, we currently have very few mechanisms for correction. As that reality plays out on the geopolitical stage, he said, you could have "this bizarre situation" in which, say, the U.S. and China have a generally good relationship in the physical world: cash flow, open communications, travel between the two countries, etc. And yet behind the scenes -- in the digital world -- those countries could be, effectively, waging war on each other through their digital infrastructure.
Their new book looks promising.

"The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business"

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Digita.../dp/0307957136

Much of it is focused on the future of States, Terrorism, War, etc., and they don't paint a rosy picture.