Despite showing occasional signs of strain, the Internet has become an integral part of all kinds of business and consumer technologies. How will it change in the years ahead to meet with new demands? We identify some key areas to watch out for.
The Internet is, of course, a unified entity only at a very basic level, where the need for common standards and protocols has managed to overcome the industry’s determination to promote proprietary technologies (sometimes talked of foolishly as “market-driven standards”). Once you move beyond a few core concepts, however—IP networking and the widespread use of varying sub-flavours of XML—it all becomes a bit diverse, to say the least. As a result, speaking about ”the future of the Internet” as if it was a singular path makes about as much sense as speaking about the future of paper shortly after the invention of the printing press.
No one had any idea what had hit them when Guttenberg built his first press in 1440, and no one made any real money out of printing anything for several decades, but once things got going, they never stopped. Even now, people continue to develop new concepts for exploiting the printed word for profit (idiotic miniature gift books, Dummies guides, Oprah Winfrey). On top of this problem, the future requirements of most business Internet users (more speed, more opportunities for profit, better interoperability) are still rather different to those of consumers (more speed, naked pictures, Oprah Winfrey). Some future developments are eminently suited to both markets; some enhance the experience of one sector at the expense (often direct) of the other.
With those cautions in mind, we’ve identified below seven areas where the Internet is likely to evolve in ways that will change your overall experience of being networked, and highlighted some of the questions you should be asking about them. Some of these will prove to be significant; others may ultimately fall by the wayside. But at this stage, they’ve all got a shot at changing the Internet as we know it today.
1. Internet2
In seeking out the future of the Internet, any project called Internet2 seems like a good place to start. However, it depends how jingoistic you’re feeling. The consortium of 200 US universities and various commercial entities backing Internet2 are certainly happy to talk up its virtues, but makes no bones of the fact that the group wants to develop leadership for the United States rather than enhance the general state of world communications. A note in the Internet2 FAQ makes this clear: “A key goal of this effort is to accelerate the diffusion of advanced Internet technology, in particular into the commercial sector. In this way, Internet2 will help to sustain United States leadership in internetworking technology.”
Despite that rather narrow-minded approach (which was, admittedly, also typical of the original deployment of the Internet), similar projects from around the world have affiliated themselves with Internet2. Locally, AARNet, the consortium which supplies high-speed Internet services to universities and the CSIRO, has deployed its own connection to the US to allow interoperation between Internet2 and the local high-speed system, GrangeNet, which provides connections of up to 10Gbps between universities on Australia’s East Coast. There’s also a little jingoism involved here. “By supporting Australia’s research communities, GrangeNet will showcase Australia’s advanced research and computational capabilities,” communications minister Senator Richard Alston noted at the program’s launch.
When not posturing over issues of national supremacy, major issues being investigated by these groups include improving videoconferencing systems, creating networks with more predictable performance, and evolving systems for collaboration across networks in real-time by both machines and individuals, including grid computing systems. Many of these issues will require totally new technologies, but some require more basic solutions. “We implemented for a number of the sessions compressed video linking a lot of sites together and found it was very difficult to get the discipline in place so that all of the sites that were participating had their microphones muted, so we wound up getting a lot of spurious audio,” academic Douglas E. Van Houweling noted in a 2001 interview following a virtual meeting of Internet2 backers. “But in the long run, if this stuff is going to work, we have to figure out how to deal with that. These are precisely the sort of seemingly mundane issues that are required to really take the next step.”
2. Will browsers die?
It’s now generally conceded that for most users, the browser wars are over, bar a few minor skirmishes. Despite the obvious flexibility and speed of Mozilla and continued interest in other solutions from the Linux community, this is a market that Microsoft has pretty much locked up with Internet Explorer (IE). According to ongoing research from Janco Associates, IE has commanded at least 50 percent market share ever since late 1997. While Netscape has enjoyed something of a comeback in the last year, it remains very much a niche player. However, the broader issue of how users will browse data when they are not actually using their PC remains somewhat less defined. In particular, the question of whether a full-blown browser is needed for smaller devices remains open, and it isn’t clear that IE will dominate this market (as a browser, it has many virtues, but slimness is not one of them). Sun has made some inroads in this market with Java-based technologies, despite its own varying approaches to standardisation.
Even Microsoft itself doesn’t see IE as the final endgame in all circumstances. It has long promoted the argument that the browser is actually an integral part of Windows, not a separate piece of software. And much of its future development effort is concentrated not on Internet browsing (the last couple of releases of IE have been roundly attacked by critics by adding very little to the browsing experience beyond larger installation files), but on more fundamental means of input. “You can imagine having speech as a new modality for your desktop experience as well,” Microsoft Research Asia speech group manager Eric Chang noted recently. “You could use it to read your e-mail or a paper or page.”
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