After canvassing over 1,400 experts for predictions on the state of the Internet by 2025, researchers from Pew Research's Internet Project concluded in a July 3 report that regulations concocted by governments and urged by large corporations would likely do much more damage to the health of the Internet than cyber crimes.
The Pew Research's study reportedly notices four common threads among the responses experts offered: the Internet would be filtered by governments seeking to leverage control over politics and security; surveillance will hurt the Internet's reliability; corporate law will influence the Internet's structure; and privacy laws may be too heavy handed.
Net Threats - Digital Life in 2025 was termed by the research organization as a "canvassing" survey, because, instead of collecting random data, it targeted technology experts that were willing to respond to organization's queries in detail.
Paul Jones, a University of North Carolina professor and founder of ibiblio.org, was one of the responded who expressed fear of heightened control by nation-states who would seek to regulate the Internet in an effort to control security and politics. Jones stated his belief that the Internet would trend along the lines technology has traditionally tread, with regulation superseding and slowing innovation.
"Historic trends are that as a communications medium matures, the control trumps the innovation," said Jones. "This time it will be different. Not without a struggle. Over the next 10 years we will be even more increasingly global and involved. Tech will assist this move in a way that is irreversible. It won't be a bloodless revolution, sadly, but it will be a revolution nonetheless."
As revelations of government data mining continues to surface, Raymond Plzak, a member of board of directors for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN), stated that inconsistencies in privacy legislation would likely lead to further fragmentation of the Internet.
"The inconsistent protection of privacy, whether private information is voluntarily provided or not as well as the inconsistent protection against exploitation will continue to be the bane of connected environment," said Plzak. "The inability of local, regional/national and international private and public sector entities and their attendant societies to cooperate to produce a universal accepted privacy and anti-exploitation environment will increase the likelihood of the limiting of connected activities."
Pew Research reported that a number of its respondents believed the continued monetization of the Internet could diminish Net neutrality and both copyright and patent laws would trap the spread of information, harming innovation and the growth of ideas.
With Google's Right to be Forgotten program rolling out in the UK, Net Threats respondents believe the automated filtering of information might obscure too much data.
Jonathan Grudin, a research at Microsoft Research, stated that a new form of reference librarian might have to emerge. Terming them "personal information trainers," these individuals would guide individuals to meaningful content that was virtually inaccessible otherwise.
