There will be lots of problems will electronics of all description. There will be many, many deaths. War will be waged.
But we weren't discussing war, we were addressing political control of the web.
Information flow is what toppled the Soviet Union, IMO.
Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union – Scott Shane
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994, 324 pp.
Chapter 3: What Price Socialism? An Economy Without Information
Pp. 77-78
My informal survey suggested that some of the longest lines in Moscow were for shoes. At first I assumed that the inefficient Soviet economy simply did not produce enough shoes, and for that reason, even in the capital, people were forced to line up for hours to buy them. Defitsit, shortage, was a workhorse of colloquial Soviet speech. The adjectival form, defitsitny, had become a term of praise, since everything desirable was in short supply: Look at this pottery I found – it’s very defitsitny. So they needed to make more shoes, I figured. Then I looked up the statistics.
I was wrong. The Soviet Union was the largest producer of shoes in the world. It was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year – twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.
The problem with shoes, it turned out, was not an absolute shortage. It was a far more subtle malfunction. The comfort, the fit, the design, and the size mix of Soviet shoes were so out of sync with what people needed and wanted that they were willing to stand in line for hours to buy the occasional pair, usually imported, that they liked.
At the root of the dysfunction was the state’s control of information. Prices are information – the information producers need in order to know what and how much to produce. In a market for product as varied in material and design as footwear, shifting prices are like sensors taped to the skin of a patient in a medical experiment; they provide a constant flow of information about consumer needs and preferences. When the state controlled prices, it deprived producers of information about demand.
The shoe factory boss churned out shoes to meet the Plan, a production quota set by bureaucrats who reported to Moscow’s hulking Gosplan, the State Planning Committee. The shoes were priced according to arcane formulae by another gos-institution (for gosudarstvo, state), Goskomtsen, the State Price Committee. The shoes were distributed by another beefy bureaucracy, Gossnab, the State Supply Committee. If the shoe factory boss was smart, the might produce 10 percent over plan, wind himself a bonus, and be named a Hero of Socialist Labor. But as far as the consumer was concerned, the factory manager operated in the dark, without any information from the market, without feedback.
Indeed, the factory’s real customer was the state, not the consumer. The state purchased all the shoe factory’s production, good, bad, or indifferent. The consumer’s choices were not allowed to enter into the matter. So, driven by the tireless efforts of the shoe factory hero and those like him, gross national product might rise and the Politburo might express satisfaction at the obvious economic progress. But on the street the picture looked less triumphant: many stores had bins of clunky shoes sitting around unbought, while down the street hundreds of people sacrificed their mornings waiting for imports.
The vague impression in the West that the Soviet economy was merely an enfeebled version of a Western economy was inaccurate. It was a different beast altogether. It was dreadfully inefficient, stubbornly resistant to change, but capable of huge feats of production. The statistical yearbooks, with their selective but impressive tables of “Comparison with Leading Capitalist Countries,” proved as much.
The shoes Soviet industry produced might end up in a landfill, but comrade, it could produce shoes.
Re: EMPBzzzt! Not so much as 'the press' would have you believe ...There will be lots of problems will electronics of all description