Based on the things I've been seeing lately, I foresee potentially grim things in the future of the Internet. Right now it's a decentralized, unmoderated network where we can do as we please, and it seems a lot of corporations and governments don't like that.
One by one, more and more countries are adopting ever-stricter laws and eventually beginning to censor all connections. Sweden, USA, Australia, now even Canada is moving this way. China and many middle-eastern countries have already been there for quite some time. Soon there will be few if any uncensored feeds, and DMCA-style nonsense anywhere you go.
At first, you won't know for sure. You won't just see some "sorry, access blocked" page. Maybe certain sites suddenly just seem to be down from your end, packets start getting lost, connections dropped, information mysteriously missing in a fashion that conveniently happens not to be terribly noticeable. And it's not all just about blocking access, either. Maybe someone starts adding tracking information into those files you're downloading. A serial number identifying who got what from where, so they can then see where it ends up.
The war is just getting started. There are those who want to make privacy and anonymity a thing of the past; those who want to police the web, enforcing horridly outdated copyright, censorship, and any other laws they feel like making up, with outrageously large lawsuits as their weaponry; those who want to end network neutrality and charge through the nose for access on a per-site basis. They are separate entities, but they are union; the axis of evil in World-Wide-Web War I, all working together to achieve their own goals. And with such "convenient" features as the unified logins mentioned in this very thread, they are making steady progress.
It's hard to say exactly what things would be like if we lost, but it's easy to tell they wouldn't be pretty. Think of having your real identity attached to every single thing you do online. Thought Facebook stalking by potential employers was bad? Wait until they can see [i]everything[/i] and you can do nothing to remove it. Think of paying not for a month's connection but for each page request - oh and you'll have to say goodbye to all those protocols that don't jive with such a system, especially the encrypted ones; BitTorrent, SSH, VNC, maybe even IRC, certainly anything custom or obscure that might be letting you disguise or hide your activities - after all, they can't bill properly for it if they can't see exactly what it is.