While US remains the center of the Web, glimpses of the future are often found at the fringes like the online porn industry and Korea.  In Korea, you can easily see how Internet Cafes can change the society itself like the opium dens of China's past.  While not everyone is doing it, everyone knows someone doing it, so they are all affected one way or another.

One common phenomenon in Korea is contents restricted to members.  While Korea's content industry is thriving, thanks to its broadband industry, most of valuable contents and services are inaccessible to non-members.  Requiring users to become a member and accumulation of membership has become such a common place that you are required to login everywhere.  Becoming a member is not easy either since you must have a Citizenship Number.  I was assigned one when I was born there, but it has since expired.  While not everysite checks validity of the Citizen Number live, I have noticed an increasing trend recently.

So what are Google and Yahoo to do in a world where identity turns into a bottleneck: if you can't find it, it might as well not exist.  Search and Identity technologies must find a way to co-exist without creating a bottleneck of the worst kind.