WSJ.com Pundits Discuss the Internets Future
Ms. Esther Dyson: The big challenges in the future will be limiting distribution of that information (security, privacy, confidentiality, etc.) on the one hand and filtering it out on the other (not search, but data-mining, exception-reporting, spam filtering, friend recommendations, behavioral targeting and the like). The big questions are who controls the filtering: individuals, organizations or governments? Will it be done transparently?
Mr. Vint Cerf: The Internet reaches only about a billion users so there are another 5.5 billion to go. It is beginning to include a good deal of information in many languages, but the domain name system needs to be outfitted with a similar capability. Access speeds are increasing but in a very non-uniform fashion. Business models for supporting various parts of the Internet are also in flux with new models being tested almost daily. Mobility is a component of the Internet that is plainly of increasing importance and will drive a variety of new applications. Entertainment media will be augmented with Internet counterparts with results that may not be entirely predictable but which will almost certainly have an interactive component missing from the traditional media. A plethora of “things” will become Internet connected and managed. There will be inventions for the use of the Internet that will come from academic and user settings to surprise us all when they appear, as they have in the past, in unexpected ways — propagating through viral advertising. There’s an Internet in your future, resistance is futile.