The Future of the Internet

I thought it would be fun to think about what the future (say, 2020?) holds for the Internet.

These concepts together paint an extremely interesting picture of what our lives of the relatively near future could be like.

Some crazy and not–so–crazy predictions:

• The Internet isn’t focused on and in a computer—it’s everywhere. The physical and digital worlds will be highly and seamlessly connected. It’s not something to “go to,” it’s baked into everything—every device, with every person, accessible in any location. People may even begin to stop using the term “Internet” because it’s just part of the fabric of daily life. Static pages and the “Web” as we know it may be on their way out.
• IPv6 instead of IPv4.
• There will be input and navigation alternatives to the mouse and keyboard: probably mostly audio, touch and motion sensor (like Kinect). This will make the internet much more interactive and personal. (This may just be more of an upgrade of devices in general)
• Faster, as in blazing fast. There will be no such thing as waiting, because of both better hardware and programming. And it will be mostly wireless.
• More governmental regulations. Everything from the complete shutting down of the Internet in certain countries to things like the SOPA fiasco (remember that?) suggest that governments will be jumping on the bandwagon and creating and enforcing more regulation. However, this won’t bring drastic changes to the Internet (at least in democratic nations)—the people won’t allow it; that’s another thing we learned from SOPA.
• Privacy and security will improve. Less exposure to viruses, etc. but another example would be the decline of password use; we will “login” to websites in a different, more seamless and more secure way.
• Services will become increasingly crowdsourced. Current examples include Waze, Quora, Wikipedia and uTest.
• Less searching for what we want, and more of it finding us. Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are gathering a bunch of information about us—that’s not for nothing. This will result in massive amounts of time saved, and much more accurate, personal and useful information at our immediate fingertips.
• Mobile will overtake the web—the majority of traffic will be from mobile devices of all kinds (this is part of the reason for the further fusion of the physical and digital worlds). Mobile devices will become even more of an extension of ourselves than they currently are.
• The switch from us being passive media consumers to having actual interaction with brands will advance much more. Along with this, brands will hand over even more control of their image to consumers.
• Social media will become so prevalent that we’ll stop using the term “social media”—it will be integrated into everything.
• A big guess—Internet access will be free, everywhere.
• Many services will migrate completely or almost completely to the Internet—things like radio, TV, telephone, and newspapers.

Additions or critiques? Comment or let me know and I’ll add them in.