The Future of The Internet

Today's task was to have a think about what direction the internet is going to take over the next 10 years.

I feel that, as with everything in this world there will always be shades of gray between the many extremes. I think there are going to be some rather interesting times ahead of us.

Due to the way that the western democracies work, it seems that they have built up a reputation of doing nothing, nothing, nothing and then suddenly in one massive knee jerk reaction bring in laws that are way exceed what was needed or even desired. As we've seen in the past governments have also taken this line with censorship.

The real problem that governments face with the internet is that it is a decentralized global system that does not follow the strict rule of country borders. Therefore to effectively police the system you need to have a set of laws that will be applied globally, otherwise you just get the situation that we have at the moment where countries like America, who are shutting down sites that host questionable material, but the people are just moving the sites to countries who will allow them to continue. This brings us the the reciprocal trade agreements we talked about yesterday where America is trying to trade on their intellectual property but are having problems with people just taking their ideas and just producing it cheaper than the American people are willing to make it for and not sending any of the profits back.

I came across a rather interesting development a little while ago, which I though was unique in it's common sense approach to copyrights. Basically in countries over in eastern Europe where 'piracy' is quite rampant the movie studios have developed this idea of the R5 copy. Basically an R5 copy of a movie is a kind of lower quality rip of the movie which is leaked/released by the studios when they release the movies to the cinemas, this allows the people who will 'pirate' the movie anyway access to the movie but at a quality which you can watch but it's not something you would burn onto a DVD and keep in your collection. This has circumvented a lot of angst and litigation while the movies studios still retain the revenue from the people who what to see the good version.

Another major issue I think that has some rather wide ranging problems is the issue of net neutrality, or the concept of keeping the internet an uncontrolled environment where people can post what ever they want. This I feel, is going to be quite a major political issue over the coming years as more people get connected and are exposed to the, shall we say, slightly less friendly aspects of the internet. The problem is that we've seemed to have decided to submit ourselves to the rule of others and if we are harmed in anyway we seem to want to blame those people who have been charged with our protection, which has brought about the whole knee jerk reaction I was discussing above. The leader have to be seen to be doing something about this perceived danger, so when they act, it's usually in an exaggerated way.

In regard to the ability to post content onto the internet in the future, I think this will be inevitably tied to the censorship issue. Will governments implement the filters at the personal, ISP, or at the communication network levels? As the new Web 2.0 gets integrated more into how we browse the web I believe that we will see a lot more usage of the tagging systems and RSS feeds, this will allow for much more accurate searches with the results being much more tailored to your own needs. This future was demonstrated in one of the videos we watch in the lectures about the rise of Google and the advent of the program called 'EPIC'.

China is another Pandora's box that is set to be opened in the not to distant future, with more people in China wanting the western style life, they are demanding access to more and more consumer goods, such as computers and the internet. This I think may prove to be the lead hammer that brakes the worlds back, with the rising pollution levels as the Chinese government sinks more money into their industries the rest of the world is going to start to feel the effects. Already there are places in China in which the air is toxic to breath, those people who have the money to move away have, those that don't have to stay and deal with it on a daily basis. In a documentary I watch recently they were filming in a town where the air was so thick with pollution the visibility had dropped to under 20 meters, the health ramifications of living in such a place are staggering. I believe that unless there is a fundamental shift in our belief systems in the 10 years or so, the world as we know it is going to change and not in a good way.

The digital literacy question is another interesting topic as we are already seeing a divide between those who have grow up with the technology in their lives to the older generation who are having to learn new things. As an example, a report I read recently was talking about the fact that the young children in primary school are already at the stage that they have multiple email addresses and Instant Messaging friends all over the globe.

In conclusion I'd have to say that the not to distant future will be a very different place to where we are now, the major issues effecting us will be, the question of net neutrality, governments trying to figure out ways to add censorship of the internet, and the population explosion that will occur and all the problems associated with it on the web if China becomes actively involved in promoting the internet to it's population.

Well I think it's home time for me, Y'all have a good one now ya hear.