What Will The Internet Of The Future Be Like?

kayser_soze asks: "I am curious as to what you guys at Slashdot think of the way the Internet as a whole will develop in the near, and not-so-near future. Personally, I always imagine something akin to the ideas William Gibson has written about in his books: a global matrix of information to which all have access. How do other people envision the Internet to come? What technologies do you guys see becoming prevalent, what things will become obsolete, and what are the most far-fetched things you can imagine will happen?"

Comments

This is the the future internet.....

[Anonymous Coward]

...you wake up one morning 10 years form now and you hit the power button on your computer and the cute microsft logo pops up. After that you see a dialog box that says connecting to internet-2 "The very best of the Microsft internet experience". Then Microsoft Outlook opens and connects to the Microsoft Internet using the Microsoft tcp/ip-2 stack with the microsft wire protocol from office 2000 built in it and you see all the ole objects being loaded up before a transfer can even occur.

After your connected, Microsft explorer then transfers to the Microsoft hotmail website. You recieve your usual email from work and work and one of the emails catches you eye. You select the message and a video pops up from your manager saying you have done a great job makeing the serers in the computer room more stable. He syas "Great work! I only had to get once last night from a server crash. Great work!

You then grin and feel good abotu your accomplishments and then you wonder about the good old days. Once a night is good hey? I remeber in the old days with unix that this was unaccep[table. Boy have times changed. You then hear a beep. You walk into the kitchen and the coffee is done and there is the paper clip from WOrd smiling at you on the coffee makers lcd screen. You have gulp slowly and dash as fast as you can towards the kitchen and hope the paper clip doesn't see you. The paper clip "says good morning ". Uh can I just have my coffee.

paper clip: "Would you like some help getting your coffee. "

you: NO!

paper clip: "How much cofee do you have left?"

you: I have plenty of cofee. GO AWAY!

paper clip: "I sense fustration, I will connect you to Microsoft Grocery store."

You then unplug the coffee maker and take the coffee out and our yourself a cup.

After this you get dressed and you enter your car for work. As soon as you start the care you here a the usual connecting shreiks of a modem connecting to the internet. You gulp and grip the sterring wheel hard for you know the paper clip will know to talk you on your way to work.

paper clip: I sensed you were difficulty with your microsoft coffee maker so I billed a repair man to your credit card and he shall be over at your house at noon today.

you: Cancel!

paper clip: sorry I can't do that for you.

A few hours later at work you were having lunch with your manager and you were telling him about the old days with linux and tcp/ip-1 stack which today is the iso tcp/ip stack and you mentioned that even though linux was banned by the dmca act of 1999 and also by Bill Gates the "King of the internet", you might still have a few old disks and you could run it at there servers.

The manager blinks at you for a few seconds and then laughs. He says, ", linux can't connect to the network. Remeber Microsoft changed the tcp/ip stack years ago by cripling virtually every client sold with there own tcp/ip stack that was protected by the DMCA act to prevetn linux form ever being compatitible. I am sorry but if the clients can't connect to the server, then teh OS is useless.

You then remeber that George W Bush cancelled the DOJ case the first month he was president and re-assured microsft that they could do whatever they wished because of there $300 million campaign contribution that rivaled Bob Doles whole entire campaign budget for 1996.

This is what I believe will be the scenario in 2010.

Nit & The Corporate Internet

[Masem]

I would not go as far as saying that Gibson propsed an idea of a network that was open to all (though that might have been the way I read the question, not what the original author met). Gibson's cyberspace was accessible to people via a number of means, but to get to the information/content, that was tightly controlled via the use of ICE and was mostly held by corporate interests.

Unfortunately, right now, we are headed that way, with various bills in the US and abroad which gives commercial copyright holders much stronger protection for their works in cyberspace than any other medium. And while most of the internet backbone and basics were developed by non-commercial interests, it's now nearly all in the hands of commercial developers, so they will have a say in what is done on *their* net assuming that nothing changes the way it's going. The Lars interview yesterday also suggested that while we're free to go out and create content that is our own, it's very hard to get people to see that content in the first place. Even nowadays, as the number of commercial 'content' sites on the web flourish, it is very hard to get a non-commercial content site up and running from scratch without a good starting base for the users.

Thus, if things keep going the way they are, we head towards the information kiosk; information and content controlled by a select few, pay-per-view or -use type pricing. The only people this benefits is the commercial business.

However, there are some major lawsuits and cases that are going to help decide if this is the direction that we will go. RIAA vs MP3 (in genenal), arguements against the DCMA, providing ISPs with no content liability, the legalities of linking, etc. There's a lot of cases that slashdot covers in YRO that if you don't follow and watch what happens, the free and open internet becomes the bleak future that Gibson descibed.