Uncertainties

What are the uncertainties that infuence the future of the internet? List what you think as possible uncetainties in the development and use of the internet in the next 10 years. Go ahead, put your ideas on this page!

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Lets start brainstorming. Some suggestions:

1. viruses - both on the user side as well as the hardware

2. terrorism - maybe just a fad

We could also apparently analyze the development and impact of spam on the usage of e-mail. Spam filters may easily cut down trustworthy messages and increase costs. Something like 80% of e-mail traffic is SPAM

Here is the link Spam&Viruses

3. the video internet, with broadband in the future?

4. the mobile internet. The mobile phone made mobile voice communiction ubiquitous. The same technology is now being applied to making internet communication equally ubiquitous. However there are many uncertainties. Will consumers adopt this technology? What applications will consumers adopt? There are also tradeoffs involved. In general to acheive greater data speeds either more aggressive modulation schemes or more spectrum is required. The first involves investments and costs, the second government regulations. What will operators and governments do in the future? How will consumers react to these developments?

5. intellectual property/copyright and the internet. The internet allows the free exchange of all sorts of protected content. Can intellectual property be protected on the internet? If so, how? If not, will the internet fundamentally make the concept of intellectual property obsolete?

6. IPv4 and IPv6. For years there have been dire predictions that the address space offered by IPv4, the underpinnings of the internet as we know it, was being quickly exhausted. IPv6 solves this problem, but it is rather incompatable and hence has not been adopted. Will the internet reach a point where new expansion becomes impossible? Will there be two internets? Will bridging technology finally come of age?

7. Device convergence. The convergence between media and the computer is already well underway. The same is true of the convergence between the phone and the internet and increasingly even the car and the internet. Some envision that one day the internet will be less about human-to-human interaction and more about device-to-device interaction. Will this come to be and what will be the results?

8. Distributed computing. As computers grow more and more powerful, most of the time the power of these machines sit idle. The internet though allows for individuals to offer this idle time to others to take on computational tasks. Deschal and Seti@Home have proven that such a framework for computation is possible. Will the internet become a marketplace for computational power? Can this sort of technology be utilized to map genomes or conduct complex scientific research?

9. The term "cyberspace" is often used to describe the internet. However, the origin of this world is from the science fiction book Neuromancer by William Gibson (and re-explored in similar ways through other science fiction writers i.e. Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash). It was meant to describe a completely different world where people interacted in a completely different way than in the physical world. It involved the whole of one's consciousness, a full virtual reality. From media, to ideas like VRML to elaborate on-line gaming worlds, baby steps have been taken in this direction. However, never does one enter into cyberspace as a seperate reality, sort of like a dream state. The technology has simply not been there. Is this original vision of cyberspace possible? How far along the evolutionary process can we get by 2015?

10. The internet as a workplace. Telecommuting has become increasingly popular. The internet has allowed for increasing levels of virtual communications, from email to video conferencing. People work closely with people for years and never see them face to face (I know this is the case with me). How much can the internet progress to making the office, the daily commute, and business travel obsolete?

11. MobileIP is a very interesting idea which if fully realized should make the internet an easy, ubiquitous part of our existence. In theory it should allow one to be on their corporate network in all ways regardless of where they are, and to allow them to seemlessly roam, without disturbance or reconfiguration from fixed-line to wifi to mobile. However, it again requires a great deal of new modifications and infrastructure. Will this idea pan out?

12. The actual speed of the internet connections and the compression methods employed to transfer files in the next ten years are high uncertainties. Experiments have been performed where they have been able to transfer several gigabytes in a couple of seconds across the atlantic, but for these speeds to become common, the entire infrastructure of the Internet must be changed. Today, the main limitation for expanded use of the Internet is the bandwidth, with DSL technologies being the preferred access types in most high-tech countries. Although these are capable of transferring as much as a few megabits per second, the factor holding these transfer speeds down may very well be the providers' financial interests.

13. The profitability in the telecommunications market and thus the development speed of new technologies is an uncertainty, as the traditional telecoms face digital convergence. Cable providers have been stealing customers from telecoms on services such as internet and voice over ip, who have responded by building fiber networks capable of extreme bandwidths. This also means that the telecoms will hit back at the cable companies, offering high-definition TV feeds, video on demand etc. All these issues will have an impact on the profitability of the converged telecom industry; in the short term the fight will probably a boost in developments and benefits for the consumers, in the mid term perhaps industry consolidation and a slow-down in developments to recover losses.

14. Who will run and govern the Internet in 2015? Currently there are several agencies responsible for parts of the internet administration, such as IANA and ICANN besides regional and national authorities such as in the EU and individual countries. But with some new propositions to revamp the internet, from players such as Cisco systems and PlanetLab, will the same organizations still be responsible or are other organizations needed?

15. The internet allows for the open exchange of information across societies. People who never have travelled far from their homes and who have only been exposed to one viewpoint can now communicate widely. However, the question remains how much different societies actually want to interact, and how much they will be allowed to. A huge percentage of traffic in the world goes to a few, corporately owned, media outlets. In countries like China, access to certain content has been restricted. Will the internet actually become a forum for discussion between multiple viewpoints or will it remain local and largely the domain of a few entrenched interests?

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Can a software be ultimately improved to a level when one can guarantee the error-free code?