Written by Ian Peter
Download audio version here
In this closing segment, we are going to look at the future of the Internet, but
through the eyes of what we have learnt about its past.
Now predicting the future is a dangerous thing to do! As we have seen, the
history of the Internet is filled with the wrecks of prophets who thought they
knew what would happen. But we are armed with a lot more information. By knowing
the past, we can more happily predict the future. So, with a bit of risk, here
goes.
Earlier on we talked about digital convergence, and that's definitely on the
future agenda still. One interesting development in this area is called ENUM -
which is a new standard that allows every telephone number to become a world
wide web address. So one day, in the not too distant future, we will have worked
out easy ways to send instant messages from mobile phones to computers and back
again. Messaging, and particularly instant messaging, something of a new genre
for the Internet - are here to stay, and are only going to get better.
The other thing which will grow through ENUM and related developments is what
they call voice over ip - or internet phones. Already we are seeing these being
adopted both by large corporations in internal networks and by hobbyists in
networks such as SKYPE - this isn't going to go away either, because at this
point of time it offers very significant savings as compared with old fashioned
telephony costs. It will take a while because telecommunications companies
aren't exactly nimble, but one day the convergence of Internet and telephone
futures will arrive.
Talking of mobile phones, wireless and mobility are again trends we can expect
to see more of in tomorrow's Internet. We are already seeing the growth of
wireless hotspots for mobile travellers in airports, hotels and other places, and
of course we are seeing a growing range of mobile devices. We have talked about
"anywhere, anytime" access for a long while - we can certainly expect to see
that grow.
Another thing we can expect to see is a lot of new developments in what is
called the 'peer to peer' space. If you know what Napster was, you can see what
peer to peer is. Peer to peer is unlike a traditional network with a central
computer through which all traffic passes - peer to peer allows almost direct
communication on the network with any other computer, for tasks such as trading
music and files. Napster spread like wildfire across the Internet, and since
then we have seen many other similar developments. Applications like this will
continue.
But there are a couple of broader issues out there as well. One of these is
multilingual domain names, which we learnt about in a previous section. As 80%
of the people on this planet don't speak English as their first language, there
is a natural desire to be able to use their own language on the Internet. Now
that's difficult at present, because the core of the Internet finds all those
difficult foreign characters hard to handle. But it's unlikely this issue will go
away. It may involve some significant changes to the Internet, but most people
believe that will happen.
Some of the things people would like to control are illegal software, music
piracy, and pornography. They're bound to continue, as are worms, viruses and
spam. Now worms and viruses simply exploit weaknesses in the Internet to be able
to proliferate freely.
Remembering again that the Internet was built for another purpose altogether,
and has been patched up like a quilt over the intervening years, its inevitable
that some work will be done to give the Internet greater security and stop the
spread of fraud. Similarly, those spam messages that use fraud (they pretend to
be someone else sending the message) can be fixed. I suspect that it's only a
matter of time before we have a more trustworthy and secure Internet.
Another thing that will become apparent as this all happens is the necessity for
access for all people in all countries, at affordable rates. Once a medium goes
so far with penetration of usage, it starts to become an economic necessity -
and at the same time, a human right to have access. That's starting to happen
with the Internet, and growth won't go away for a long time.
All this means that our future Internet, rather than having 600 million users,
may have close to 6 billion. So we are about 10% of the way there, and there is
a lot of growth to come.
What does that say for the protocols and for governance? Well, the only thing
that is for sure is that things will continue to change. We can expect to see a
larger role for the United Nations - we can expect some major protocol changes -
but, to the end user, all of this should be able to happen without much fuss or
concern.
If you want more information about the future of the Internet, we invite you to visit our sister site, www.internetmark2.org.
Special offer - buy this history in Audio CD form - $8.95 plus postage - more info here
Permission to re-use this material for non-commercial purposes is granted provided that
www.nethistory.info is appropriately
credited as the source.
Please feel free to link to this page!
If you've read this far, and liked the material, get yourself a copy by buying
Ian Peter's History of the Internet Audio CD here