It’s the year 2020. Most people use mobile devices to connect to the Internet; voice-recognition and touch-based user interfaces are in greater use; and notions of privacy will have changed as the differences between personal and work time or physical and virtual reality become fewer.
Those are some of the findings from a new report, The Future of the Internet III, from the Pew Internet and American Life Project with Elon University in North Carolina.
‘Universal Standards’
The prediction that most Internet access will be through mobile devices includes an expectation that telephony throughout the world will be offered “under a set of universal standards and protocols” so users can have “reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world to another.”
Al Hilwa, a program director for industry research firm IDC, agreed that the movement toward universal standards is well under way, with the rest of the world already more in sync with each other than the United States is. He predicted that access to the Net through mobile devices for most people could “very well happen” before 2020 in emerging nations. He noted that countries with fewer investments in an existing infrastructure could more easily move to a new generation of mobile access.
Perhaps that access will lead to fewer wars. The report also contends that people will be more tolerant than today because of wider exposure via the Internet and other communications technologies. This, the report predicts, will lead to lower levels of violence, including sectarian strife, and fewer overt acts of hate crimes.
The copyright wars between content owners and content holders will have calmed down by 2020, it predicts, because of strict content controls put in place by legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media companies. The controls include automatic billing for use of copyrighted materials.
But this control will…