I read a lot of trade magazines during lunch. This article really caught my eye ....
A few excerpts from http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=193091 (http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=193091)
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It is 2029 – exactly 40 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. Not a long time in the history of the planet, but an eon in the history of the Internet.
The Internet has now completed its metamorphosis to "Outernet" – a transformation marked by two tipping points, which occur within a few years of each other.
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In fact, the journey to the Internet's darker side has already begun with a game-changing addition to the Web's most popular application: search.
Search services like Google and Bing, social media networks like Facebook and MySpace, computer software developers like Microsoft, and e-commerce sites like Amazon and E-Bay now monitor and store information about users' search activity and use this data to create profiles about who the searchers are (identity), where they are (location), what they want (preferences), how much money they have (financial status), and what they are likely to do or buy next (predictive analysis).
These user profiles are already valuable to companies looking to target consumers in the virtual world of the Internet with advertising for their real-world goods and services. But as the Internet replaces traditional supply chains, these profiles are set to become an asset of increasing, almost inestimable worth – the equivalent of the commodities that powered the industrial revolution.
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So, five or six years have passed, and Internet users are becoming used to (if not happy with) paying for digital content, and they are aware (if quite unhappy) that they are being profiled in increasing detail.
But it is around this time that things on the Internet start to get really weird. Broadly speaking, this is because while "paying for stuff" and "people keeping records about us" are familiar concepts, the next big trend coming to the Internet is something completely new – "predictive analytics."
As the name suggests, predictive analytics is the science of using statistical analysis to extract specific information from data and use it to predict future trends and behavior patterns.
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And now, again, and in one of the greatest paradoxes of the modern Internet, the work to develop predictive analytics code is being funded by government-controlled intelligence agencies that many believe should be defending citizens' digital rights, rather than helping to create the very technologies that will ultimately obliterate the last semblances of global digital privacy for Internet users.
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The decline in US Internet dominance will be as dramatic as that of the British Empire, only it will happen considerably faster – in Internet time.
In sheer numbers, the US is already surrounded and outnumbered by the rest of the world. The Internet population of China today outnumbers the entire population – connected and unconnected – of the United States. Within three years, India will reach the same milestone. Countries like Pakistan and Vietnam have seen Internet growth rates of over 10,000 percent since the year 2000.
The result: Within five years Internet users in the US will be relegated to a small minority – 8 percent of the Earth's total Internet population.
English as a language also will be minoritized and marginalized. The lingua franca of the new Internet will be the same as that of the old Internet: the Internet Protocol (IP). But the languages carried by that protocol will be truly multilingual. Arabic, Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin will dominate – giving new meaning to the term "Semantic Web."
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Fast forward. It is now 2029 and in the aggregate things have not gone according to plan for the world's Internet users. In fact they have not gone well at all.
But the Internet has yet another trick up its sleeve for mankind – a real planet buster.
Far from bridging the gap between Islamic fundamentalists and Western culture, the Internet has served to broaden it via the creation of vast Islamic online communities with billions of members. The only real point of contact between Western culture and these networks is via Western intelligence communities' attempts to monitor, manipulate, control, and suppress the dialogues that are taking place there.
In this 2020 world, existing geopolitical rifts grow yet wider. (Much of Sub-Saharan Africa is still a hell – albeit one where genocidists/rapists are able to efficiently coordinate atrocities via 4G handheld technology.)
In an increasingly tense online world, Western technology fights bit-for-byte versus Islamic fundamentalist culture in a virtual Internet battlefield of mind over medium.
Welcome to the Outernet.
Is this really the future of the Internet? I think it's pretty close. You probably disagree.
In the end, all we really know for a fact right now is that the Internet is a force that no company or government or individual can control. Like the development of the original Internet itself, the Outernet will arise organically, and with an almost palpable disregard for the posturing of those who claim to know the future of communications technology.
And that includes both of us.
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Be afraid, my friends. Be very afraid.
That's about the only thing good when you're 72. You're not going to be around when the shit hit the fan.
But I will say one thing, I'm not go into a fetal position and shake in fear over something like this. Because the only thing they can do to you is kill you, and I'm not that afraid of dying. Who give a damn.