The Future of the Internet

From Mindwest Strategies (http://mindwest.net/)

Now• Broadband: higher speeds• Adoption: more people online• Everything is miscellaneous (and I feel lucky)• Skype vs distance: cheap, immediate

communication• Broadcast: Hulu/BitTorrent/Netflix vs television• Politics: Grassroots Adhocracies, Tea Party• Mobility: the world in your pocket, augmented

reality

2/3 (66%) of adults in the U.S. have home broadband connections. The figure was 63% a year ago. Broadband penetration is growing, but slowly.

By a 53% to 41% margin, Americans say they don’t believe the spread of affordable broadband should be a major government priority. (Does this mean that it shouldn’t be a priority for business?)

~ Pew Internet and American Life Project,August 11, 2010

Effects• Network effect: everybody gets your email;

the Internet becomes exponentially more useful and productive

• Down side: Unmanageable deluge of useful information

• Even more unmanageable deluge of useLESS information - spam and noise

• Value: money changes everything

Scenarios: Network• Internet: Free and open network of networks,

end to end principle, “dumb network”• Cable television: limited selections delivered

with a high quality of service. Relatively high barrier to entry on the content side

• Balkanized hybrid: walled gardens and pay walls plus low-bandwidth, lower-value everything else; providers and users pay for higher QoS

For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he

invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today. Websites across the developing world deliver high quality coding to complement the very best ideas from anywhere. This is a platform that has made democratic innovation possible—and it was on the Facebook platform resting on that Internet platform that another Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, organized the most important digital movement for Obama, and that the film’s petty villain, Sean Parker, organized Causes, one of the most important tools to support nonprofit social missions.

~ Larry Lessig

Scenarios: Applications• Many distributed sites, platforms, and applications,

open architectures, data portability• Mobile and targeted applications• Recasting the stockpile of information in usable

form (Doug Imbruce in Newsweek, “The Wild, Wild Web”) – Qwiki / Curated information experience: machines filter and present content

• Facebook and Google rule: people filter, find, and present content (with help from search tools)

Jon Lebkowskyjon@plutopiaproductions.com

http://plutopiaproductions.comhttp://weblogsky.com

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