How open will the internet be in 20 years?

There are four looming threats casting a shadow of doubt on the prospect of maintaining an open Internet by 2025, according to a canvassing of more than 1,400 experts by the Pew Research Center Internet Project. The experts were posed this question about the future of the Internet: “By 2025 will there be significant changes for the worse and hindrances to the ways in which people get and share content online compared with the way globally networked people can operate online today?” According to Pew, 35 percent answered with a pessimistic “yes,” while 65 percent answered with an optimistic “no.” Respondents were also given an optional open-ended follow-up question asking them to elaborate on the most serious threats to accessing and sharing content on the Internet, along with what measures should be taken to preserve people’s “optimal future capabilities in using the Internet.”

In the eve of Independence Day, a who’s who of computer experts say that government control, consumer distrust and corporate greed threaten the future of the Internet as we know it, In a report released Thursday, the Pew Research Center distilled the concerns of over 1,400 computer experts, Internet visionaries and researchers canvassed earlier this year. They were asked whether people will be more or less able to freely share information online in the year 2025. Sixty-five percent said the web of the future would be more open, 35% less. The good news is that by 2025 “every human being on the planet will be online. The collision of ideas through the sharing network will lead to explosive innovation and creativity,” said filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards. But the open structure that has made the Internet so powerful is under threat, say the experts. “What the carriers actually want—badly—is to move television to the Net, and to define the Net in TV terms: as a place you go to buy content, as you do today with cable,” said Doc Searls, director of Project VRM at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. That’s a far cry from the heady beginnings of the Internet, when users first realized they individually had the power to reach millions of others without publishing houses, newspapers or television stations acting as intermediaries.