The problem with the digital*
When you buy a hammer, you purchase a physical object whose traits will not change. The hammer is made out of wood--the handle--and of metal--the hammer per se. Each time you use the instrument to perform an action, say hitting a nail on the head, you reasonably expect the hammer to behave in the same manner every-time you perform this action. The impact of a hard and heavy piece of steal, whose momentum will lead to a set of predictable outcomes. The nail will enter the pieces of wood, uniting them to form a stable and coherent bond that will last many years. We will hold these implicit attitudes towards the nail, a physical technological object, as well: consistent and predictable behaviors.
Not so for the digital.
Those entities which exist in bits and bytes of ones and zeros, be they images, documents, software, browsers, and even operating systems do not behave in this manner. They are in fact magical 'black boxes' that can be easily (and unknowingly) modified and transformed. This is what gives them their unique traits, which can be used towards positive or negative ends. A digital 'hammer' need not behave in the same consistent manner which the physical hammer behaves--it can stretch, it can become transparent, or it can hammer a million nails from a single blow.
While this power has enabled movies to create magical worlds that break with the restrictions of physical reality, little is it considered how the very same flexibility of software can be used to bend long acquainted objects and relations in the physical world--particularly the world of software which serves real purposes for real people. Digital objects that may appear to be predictable need not necessarily behave in this manner; our belief in its 'solidity' is actually a projection of our expectations of the physical world onto this world. When one considers the increased use of software and computers in daily life, this new dynamic leads to extremely worrisome scenarios with regard to the abuse of power. One plus one need not equal to two (2) in the world of the digital.
A careful consideration of the possible abuses of power implicit in this new digital world means that it is of some importance that legislature be written immediately to protect consumers and, users more broadly, from the abuse of power by those institutions which control that technology.