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To be honest with you, I never found much fear on offer at Halloween, besides the perfunctory fear of getting wedged into a costume for another evening of drollery at my expense. But as weeks on the Web go, it's been terrifying.

Fear-mongering has been a long-standing staple of Internet commentary. Some of it is misplaced, especially the parts you read in chain letters. But when I look across the Web, some things truly scare me. Trick or treat, you say? Here's what keeps me up at night.

The approaching muzzle

Censorship is the province of authoritarian states such as China, Cuba, Myanmar and … Australia? This week, we learned that the land down under has been working up plans to censor the Web centrally, and force Internet service providers to make sure that certain content never reaches their subscribers.

The Great Firewall of Australia, as folks are calling it, is being built for the most laudable of reasons, including stopping child pornography. But good intentions are a well-documented paving material. Now other Australian legislators are proposing that the system be expanded to block off even legal adult materials (at least for certain subscribers) or online casinos, which are illegal there.

Censoring the Internet by filtering the tubes that connect it together is tempting, whether you're trying to protect children, prevent terrorism or crack down on movie piracy. But while people must be held accountable for their words, they first need to be able to speak without restraint. That's the point of free speech. Filtering at this level prevents free expression in the first place, and if you think it can't happen in a Western democracy, then I've got a large rock in the Outback to sell you.

The world without newspapers

This week, The Christian Science Monitor, a 100-year-old newspaper, announced that it would end its run as a print product and move entirely online.

Progress, you say? That depends on the price that progress extracts. So far, the vigorous efforts that North American newspapers have been making to reinvent themselves for the Web have not made up for declining circulation; the advertising that gets printed on dead trees remains more lucrative than the kind that Google sells.

Mercifully, we seem to be past the point where people are telling us that the answer is somewhere in the thicket of blogs or sites such as the Huffington Post that pay a few editors but rely on volunteer writers. No less than Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was quoted two weeks ago as saying that the Web risks being a “cesspool” of misinformation without trusted brands providing content. Great journalism can come from anywhere, but someone has to pay for it. I'd be reassured if I knew how that was going to work.

The copyright meltdown

The debate about whether Canadians will be able to make cat videos set to their favourite music is coming back. With the re-election of the Conservatives, the copyright reforms they introduced earlier this year will likely be resurrected. Many artists, major labels and distributors are every bit as apprehensive as journalists as they watch the Internet upend their industries, and are eager for anything that will protect their content from rampant downloading.

But the legislation the Tories introduced was flawed: Among other things, it would have made it illegal to break a digital lock (which you might do inadvertently by copying a DVD you purchased to your hard drive). Copyright is about balance, and I don't envy the people tasked with striking this one. But the consequences of slanting that balance in the wrong direction would create a culture of fear and disenfranchisement.

The nuclear leak

Everybody knows that privacy and the Internet go together like cats and a shower.

Much of the discussion has been dominated by oversharing – where kids these days are induced to live their private lives in public – and the prospect that companies might take the information we give them and use it for some nefarious purpose, like making money.

But we seem to fret less about the Web equivalent of a nuclear meltdown: a security breach in which information gets loose from companies like Google, Bell, Rogers and Facebook. So much of what we do online passes through the gates of firms like these.

I'm not worried that Ted Rogers, sitting in his tower, will give a maniacal cackle and set free the logs of which sites you visited this month. (Everybody knows he only cackles when he raises cellphone rates.) But I do worry that somebody will make a mistake.

It famously happened at America Online in 2006, when a well-meaning employee released millions of searches that had ostensibly been made anonymous for research purposes. It took The New York Times mere days to look at the data and figure out the identity of several searchers, as well as their particular diseases and/or fetishes.

That was a deliberate, if poorly considered release, but it could happen accidentally – or involuntarily. Programmers make mistakes, and hackers want in. Somewhere out there, the perfect storm is brewing.

Boo!