The Internet could end up like TV

"Far from being a place of freedom, innovation and information, the Internet as we know it is dying, Stanford University's Jennifer Granick told a packed house at the Black Hat computer security conference Wednesday.

"It's not the level playing field that we once thought it would be," she said.

The openness and freedom that originally made the online world so disruptive is fading, Granick says, and the once free-wheeling Net is being replaced with a centralized, regulated entity.

The Internet, she fears, could end up like TV."