Robert X. Cringely writes about the upcoming move Microsoft is making with Palladium. He writes in a style that even non-tech's should understand about why this move of shifting the networking protocols towards something Microsoft "invents" is an extremely bad thing:
The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That's taking the Internet and turning it into MSN.This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn't choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh.
Under Palladium as I understand it, the Internet goes from being ours to being theirs.
It is an effort by Microsoft to take literal ownership of Internet technology, Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy applied for the Nth time, though on a grander scale than we've ever seen before. While there is some doubt that the PC will survive a decade from now as a product category, nobody is suggesting the Internet will do anything but grow and grow over that time. Palladium assures that whatever hardware is running on the network of 10 years from now, it will be generating revenue for Microsoft.