Top boffins detail how to save the open internet from breaking itself

Internet of sh*t

It would be for the best if the 'internet of things' just didn't happen.

Bah!

"social justice"?

Since when does the internet provide social justice? The Internet is nothing if not a digital school playground. Anonymous bullying it serves up by the shovelful, but social justice is a bit thin on the ground.

Optional

Predicting the future is a bit hard, isn't it? I think the safest thing to do with reports like this is to use them to occupy spare disk space, sit back, and see what actually happens.

the approach taken by such groups as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Society (ISOC) and so on "may not always be sustainable, particularly as the pioneers who established and remain key supporters of these bodies disappear from the scene." Well, I don't think the dependency on the pioneers is very important. What I see in those organizations is regular turnover in the leadership. OK, Steve Crocker wrote RFC 1 and is currently chairing ICANN, but he's virtually the only pioneer still in such a position. (Tim Berners-Lee is an upstart, whose Internet history only started in 1989.)

Late report or time travel?

"The internet could go one of three paths in the next decade, according to an elite group of policymakers: open and global; unequal and uneven; or dangerous and broken."

It looks like option three has been the default for about thirty years now, if most tech headlines are anything to go by.

MultiNet anyone

I've often wondered if we'll end up with more than one 'type' of internet. I know nothing about it so probably barking up the wrong tree.

One would be a Gov't and business internet for inter and intra-business/Gov't activity only. It would have access to all the premium routing/resilience/hardware and security measures. It may even have it's own unique proprietary protocol.

Another would be for business interface to customers and academic interchange. As a commercial space they'll insist on any user being registered and identifiable and open to monitoring to reduce fraudulent activity. It would have 2nd level premium routing/resilience/hardware and security measures.

There will be more 'island' internets emerge that have hard borders to ward off the intrusion of the state actors like US, UK, China and Russia.

Then there would be the general purpose web, the poorer cousin with non-premium routing and hardware, a free-for-all approach to security, essentially what we have now. Businesses operating here are more likely to be using crowd-funding and digital currencies. The elites will attempt to let this internet wither and die by making it more attractive to sign up to the 'business' internet. But it may end up evolving in unexpected ways through clever innovation and peoples general desire to not be dictated to by business and Gov't.