I agree!
You need to copyright that, it would make one hell of a near future S/F story plot.
I think you've got at least two SF writers here salivating over the possibilities...
The Sheep Look Up is my favorite Brunner; even beats Stand on Zanzibar (I'm not sure Tom would like it, because its political stand is pretty much antithetical to his). The Brunner novel I think of most often when contemplating where the Net today and how it got there is Shockwave Rider, written in 1975. "Predictive" SF is always a matter of hindsight applied to fortuitous imagining, but Brunner got a lot of it right, and many call him the "Father of Cyberpunk".