Copyright, Idealists out of Luck with Internet Future, Say Experts
By 2020 the Internet could develop into a series of partitioned sectors in response to concerns about spam and cybercrime, some Internet experts and futurists said, but it won’t be completely rebuilt. They were responding to a series of scenarios proposed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in its third Future of the Internet survey. More than 1,000 people responded to Pew’s scenarios, designed not to be predictive but provocative, said Janna Anderson, an Elon University professor and a co-author of a report on the research.
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The eight scenarios covered technology advances, changes in copyright law, the spread of technology, the underlying architecture of the Internet and technology’s effect on people’s lives and perceptions of each other. Anderson said she wasn’t surprised by the responses, with one exception. “I think I was a little bit surprised on the pushback on the tolerance question,” she said. Pew had posited that the Internet would increase social tolerance because of wider exposure to differing views, and that people would become more forgiving of others because a reduction in privacy means everyone will be exposed some online. Only 32 percent of the experts agreed that social tolerance would increase. “The Internet is a danger to social tolerance,” said Fred Ledley, founder and chairman of Mygenome. “It makes it harder to appreciate what is fringe behavior by a small number of individuals, and what represents a true movement or organization.”
Nor did the experts think that copyright protectionists would prevail. Only 31 percent agreed strict content controls, automatic billing or automatic notification to the authorities by ISPs of potential subversion would apply. There was a consensus that regulators won’t find a universally accepted policy. Instead, many thought that new financial models will emerge. “Consumer demand for openness will largely prevail over the effort to preserve pre-digital business models,” said Lea Shaver, Access to Knowledge program coordinator at the Yale Information Society Project. Futurist Scott Smith said payments will be built into device costs, among other ways. Josh Quittner, executive editor of Fortune magazine, said a system of micropayments could develop if advertising can’t provide enough revenue for content. Author Nicholas Carr suggested that ISPs might charge a monthly arts fee, which would be split among copyright-holders by use of their works. David Moschella, global research director for Computer Sciences Corporation’s Leading Edge Forum, thinks there will be “multiple levels of copyrights.” Clement Chau envisions a complete transformation of the system, so that “rather than creators having the ‘rights to own’ intellectual property, audience will pay to have the ‘rights to participate.'” ICANN board member Susan Crawford said “things will stay lumpy and unpredictable,” adding that some countries and network providers probably won’t agree with proposed solutions.
Others said there must be a way to compensate content creators. “No viable business model has emerged or will likely emerge to pay artists who create content in any other way but in selling copies of their content which they must therefore copyright,” said lecturer Catherine Fitzpatrick of the Open Society Institute. “Making the content free hinges on a philosophy that the state or philanthropy must pay all content creators, and that has many troubling ramifications for the freedom and viability of content creation. ISPs will simply find ways to bill for microchunks of content more expertly and efficiently, and, as more and more people monetize time online, billing micropayments will become normalized.”
Despite government-sponsored programs in the U.S. and Europe to develop a “next-generation” or “clean-slate” Internet, 78 percent of the experts said the Internet will be refined rather than replaced. “The current Internet won’t be replaced by a new system by 2020 any more than the highway system originally built in the 1950s has been replaced,” said consultant Scott Brenner. Some said the Internet is “already undergoing the most major overhaul since its beginnings, as improvements in the technologies of the architecture are introduced and it transitions to Internet Protocol version 6,” the report said. Others said security and privacy concerns will increase.
“We will eventually only be able to interact with the Web with a personal biometric/genetic code which will imprint on any interaction we provide,” said Robert Eller of Concept Omega. “This should remove all forms of fraud or spam.” Cambria Ravenhill, manager of national channel planning at TELUS Communications, said the Internet will be divided into official and underground networks. Garland McCoy, founder of the Technology Policy Institute, also sees two Internets in the future: “One for ‘us’ and one for the financial institutions, security folks, spooks, government agencies, major corporations, etc. That almost exists today.” Mark Youman, principal at ICF International, said independent networks will be built when the Internet becomes too overrun or corrupted, and “access to these networks will be part of what defines the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots.'” Benjamin Ben-Baruch, senior market intelligence consultant and applied sociologist for Aquent, also foresees a digital gap between the haves and the have nots. “Security and privacy on the current Internet will be increasingly compromised,” he said, because hackers will work more quickly than security and because, as the next-generation Internet develops, “hackers and spammers and pirates and other Internet criminals will focus on the much easier but very lucrative prey on the current Internet.”
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project, said the responses to the “next-generation” Internet scenario surprised him, because so much effort is devoted to thinking about a “do-over” Internet.