Can/will this lead to a stifling of true innovation? If this existed and there was one in that the famed Apple garage, or in the house rented by Zuck and his friends, would IBM have let Apple happen, or Google let the FB grow? How many prescient individuals (the future is already here, just not evenly distributed, as Gibson said) do you need to spy on to "manage" innovation in a way to prevent disruption? Could this surveillance era be the beginning of a technology dark age? What really disruptive things have happened since iphone(2007)?
This is the plot of the movie Antitrust. The idea of spying on potential competitors using surveillance didn't make sense in the movie and doesn't make sense in real life. If this were being done on a scale large enough to stifle innovation we would have heard about it a long time ago.
Really, the post-snowden paranoia is getting out of hand.
why would any company large enough to fund R&D take risks to develop something truly innovative when it could just combine incremental innovation rolled up into an advertising/commerce-linked platform?
especially for anyone trying to develop new hardware, patent barriers have made it much more risky and difficult--especially for small companies--to build things that are truly innovative or disruptive. and to the extent anyone does, they're likely to get bought out by a major company.
(edit typo)