Here Are Four Threats the Internet Faces in the Next Decade

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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… This by far is the most serious threat to sharing information on the Net, because it undermines and sidelines the Net’s heterogeneous and distributed system for supporting everybody and everything, and biases the whole thing to favor a few vertically-integrated ‘content’ industries.

---- Doc Searls, director of ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

If society continues to value devices and connectivity (containers and plumbing) over content, the growth in access to more content will do little to improve the lives of individuals or societies. It will continue to become easier for people around the world to exchange ever greater amounts of content. … The challenge will be in separating the wheat from the chaff.

---- Michael Starks, an information science professional.