Some chose to remain anonymous while others offered comments on the record.
Among the issues driving changes in the Internet, the respondents said, were Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, and widespread data breaches like the one affecting millions of customers of retailer Target.
“The pressures to balkanize the global Internet will continue and create new uncertainties. Governments will become more skilled at blocking access to unwelcome sites,” said Paul Saffo, managing director at Discern Analytics and consulting associate professor at Stanford University.
Danah Boyd, a research scientist for Microsoft, noted that “because of governance issues (and the international implications of the NSA reveals), data sharing will get geographically fragmented in challenging ways. The next few years are going to be about control.”
Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that “censorship still poses a major threat to communications worldwide. More than one-third of those who access the Internet are accessing a censored version of it and that number continues to grow.”
But Vint Cerf, Google vice president and co-inventor of the Internet protocol, was more optimistic.
“The Internet will become far more accessible than it is today — governments and corporations are finally figuring out how important adaptability is,” he wrote.
“AI (artificial intelligence) and natural language processing may well make the Internet far more useful than it is today.”
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