Please drop the hyperbole, there is already enough of an impedance mismatch here. We're talking about slow moving ecosystems, and social normalizing of new technological restrictions. The current locked boot mess has taken oven twenty years to develop since the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance was founded. The pace of change accelerates, but five years won't even make remote attestation available in browsers. I'd say it's at least 15 years until a significant number of websites would require it. Using it for network access control would take further technological development (probably on the corporate side), and then some kind of crisis to drive ISPs/governments to demand consumer implementation. It's worrying because it's a step on the slow monotonic authoritarian march, not because the sky is falling right now.
What if I had told you 5 years ago that in 2020, people in Western countries would be forbidden from leaving their homes without permission, and would have to show a digital pass on their phone to be allowed to go into shops?
The technology for remote attestation already exists, and it would take less than a year to roll out checks for it across all ISPs in a country. As you say, it would need some sort of crisis for a government to demand it, but an ill-intentioned government with an offensive cyber-war capability could manufacture that crisis tomorrow if it wanted.
We already have authoritarian Western nations like Poland allegedly using cyber-weapons against opposition politicians[0]. I don't think that claiming existing technology could be used in 5 years is a claim that "the sky is falling right now". The main thing holding back such a scheme is that it would force a lot of legitimate users offline, which is why I think 5 years should be enough time to make those affected users a small enough minority that a government could ignore them.
[0] https://www.euronews.com/2022/01/05/polish-watergate-tension...
When predictions of our future read like dystopian science fiction such as Stallman's "Right to Read", 1984, etc. the only course of action is to educate the masses and strongly oppose any further progression down that path.
Well I'm coming from a USian perspective, so that prediction wouldn't have come true. But really, trying to contain contagious disease is a societal response with longstanding precedent, and implementing a digital ID like that is technologically easy (at minimum, it's just showing fields from a database). If you had predicted these actions because of a pandemic, it would have been plausible.
Meanwhile if you had predicted similar digital passes in 2000 it would not have been immediately plausible because very few people were carrying around a computer in their pocket. That had to be developed first by private industry, wanted by the consumer market, and the idea of having "apps" for various facets of your life socially normalized, before it could come to pass.
> The technology for remote attestation already exists
What do you mean by technology ? Yes the concept exists, and yes some implementations exist, and yes some are in the hands of consumers. But I wouldn't say the "technology exists" for general web browsing, in that it's available for a single actor, even controlling both ends, to decide to start using remote attestation.
> The main thing holding back such a scheme is that it would force a lot of legitimate users offline
Yes that is one aspect. Another aspect is the lack of implementations for companies to use to start demanding its use. Another aspect is that there has been no application of it to network access control. Yet another aspect is that the government does not understand they have this lever to pull until the trail is blazed by industry. In Y2K authoritarian government went "find a way to stop bad communications on the Internet" and their underlings went "uhh pull the plug?". In Y2020 there are many companies selling carrier-scale TLS MITM and other DPI gear.
All of these things take time. As I said, it has been over 20 years since the TCPA was founded, and you can see where we are. You can directly translate your arguments here to arguments about secure boot in 2000, and yet governments in 2005 were not trying to prohibit computers without secure boot. We had to take a long roundabout trip through a new device type of phones/tablets (for RA this could be security keys) for it to become palatable.
Only now that the market has gotten there on its own would it be plausible for a government to prohibit any device that isn't locked down with secure boot. Even so, it wouldn't be currently advantageous for the more totalitarian countries to mandate this, since they do not fully control the device's manufacturers. That is another progression that will take time before it's ready to click into place.
It also makes it harder to spread awareness of the threat, since the really concerning implications sound farfetched. Not thinking about it too hard, why would anybody buy a computer that restricts what they can do? Well, the Market finds a way.