Internet in 2025: Govt surveillance, commercialisation to be greatest threats

What will be the biggest threats to the Web in 2025? That’s a question asked to more than 1,400 experts in a study conducted by the Pew Research Center. Majority of respondents believed by 2025 there will not be significant changes for the worse and hindrances to the ways in which people get and share content online today; and technology innovation will continue to afford more new opportunities for people to connect.

However, some experts expressed wide levels of concern that this yearning for an “open Internet” will be challenged by trends that could sharply disrupt the way the Internet works for many users today as a source of largely unfettered content flows.
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Experts identified four biggest threats to the open Internet in the next 20 years:

Balkanisation of the Internet: Actions by nation-states to maintain security and political control will lead to more blocking, filtering, segmentation, and balkanisation of the Internet. They pointed out that nations such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey have blocked Internet access to control information flows when they perceived content as a threat to the current regime. China is known for its “Great Firewall,” seen as Internet censorship by most outsiders.

Some respondents cited the Arab Spring as an example of the power of the Internet to organise political dissent and they then commented on how this prompted crackdowns by governments. Others cited governments’ application of broad rules that limit the exchange of all information in order to try to halt criminal activity.

“The pressures to balkanise the global Internet will continue and create new uncertainties. Governments will become more skilled at blocking access to unwelcome sites,” Paul Saffo, managing director at Discern Analytics and consulting associate professor at Stanford University said.

Govt, corporate surveillances will erode trust: Majority of respondents mentioned Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance of email and phone call records. They believe trust will evaporate in the wake of revelations about government and corporate surveillance and likely greater surveillance in the future.

Similarly, Peter S. Vogel, Internet law expert at Gardere Wynne Sewell, responded, “Privacy issues are the most serious threat to accessing and sharing Internet content in 2014, and there is little reason to expect that to change by 2025, particularly given the cyber terror threats confronting the Internet users and worldwide businesses.”

“Because of governance issues (and the international implications of the NSA reveals), data sharing will get geographically fragmented in challenging ways. The next few years are going to be about control,” Danah Boyd, a research scientist for Microsoft.

Monetisation of Internet a serious concern: Commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life. A significant number of respondents predicted that increased monetisation of Internet activities will hurt the ways in which people receive information in the future. Among their concerns: the fate of network neutrality; restrictions on information exchange affected by copyright protections and patent law; and governments’ and corporations’ general lack of foresight and capability for best enabling the digital future due to a focus on near-term gains.

David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, noted, “Commercialisation of the experience may come to bound or limit the expectation that many people have of what the Internet is for.”

“It is very possible we will see the principle of Net neutrality undermined. In a political paradigm where money equals political speech so much hinges on how much ISPs and content providers are willing and able to spend on defending their competing interests. Unfortunately, the interests of everyday users count for very little,” PJ Rey, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland added.

Too much information problem: Efforts to fix the TMI (too much information) problem might over-compensate and actually thwart content sharing, according to experts.

“While there are pressures to constrain information sharing (from governments and from traditional content sources), the trend towards making information more widely and easily reached, consumed, modified, and redistributed is likely to continue in 2025. The biggest challenge is likely to be the problem of finding interesting and meaningful content when you want it,” Joel Halpern, an engineer at Ericsson.