Under the Obama administration, we are likely to continue down the road of Internet censorship.

Following last night's , we must now ask: What does this mean for the computer industry?

It seems to me that both candidates were intent on continuing the gradual censorship of the Internet. This is largely because the public does not seem to care about the importance of an open and free Web or, for that matter, the importance of their privacy. They are more frightened by terrorists.

But how many Americans were killed by terrorists in the United States last year? Or the year before that? Well, in fact, terrorism as a threat is merely a ruse.

Perhaps the complaining about privacy violations is a smokescreen and it's really all about music and movies, like it has been since the days of the late Jack Valenti. (You remember him, right? He was the guy who did his best to thwart the VCR, since it could be used to watch taped movies taken from the TV. Look him up.)

For as far back as I can remember, we have fought how we can use digital and other technologies. It's a never-ending farce. I recall how everyone was aghast at the suggestion that the French government was implementing a three-strike rule for people who downloaded music illegally. The rule was that if you were caught once, you'd be warned; twice, you'd be fined; the third time, you would be forever cut off from the Internet. This was horribleunimaginable, even.

Meanwhile, the main ISPs in the United States all agree to a six-strike rule that has the same penalties. They added three extra strikes so it doesn't seem as bad. I'm sure it has been tested by a focus group.

The colluding companies are Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, and Cablevision. None of these companies benefits from playing policeman, but they are all doing it anyway at the behest of the government (with a wink). The government is doing it at the behest of Hollywood, which argues that it needs complete control over all its entertainment content.

As an aside, I want to mention a known fact that throws a wrench in the debate: during the heyday of Napster, when people were sharing music files like crazy, CD sales were actually growing. This was largely because file-sharing has replaced radio as a way to discover new music. Once Napster was shut down, CD sales began to slide and never recovered. Now it is all done by download and the industry has lost control of its channels.

When you bring this up with the executives, they scream at you and say that it is all theft. And during the Napster era, I can assure you they were literally screaming.

Our government is comprised of computer illiterates who are quite happy to listen to a Hollywood executive bemoaning something like BitTorrent, when really they have zero clue what BitTorrent is or how it works.

So, the ISPs have created the Center for Copyright Information, which apparently hired a monitoring operation called MarkMonitor. You can see what it is up to on its website. According to the TorrentFreak website, MarkMonitor will be the actual investigator.

The MarkMonitor site claims that piracy accounts for $200 billion a year in lost entertainment industry revenue. Really? This is not verifiable by any means and was developed to buffalo the U.S. Senate.

So this is what is coming and apparently the entertainment business is destined to bleed out by gunshots to the foot. I wish it luck.