Predicting the Next Big Thing for next year is tall order, but I’ve got some thoughts around what we will be seeing by 2020 so I’m going to give that one a shot. Think long term! - SRA

A new global inter-network will be launched sometime in the next 5 years. It will be physically separate from the Internet, on its own leased lines, own domain name system, own protocols, own branding. There will be no bridge back to the Internet.

It will be marketed to the corporate world. A place where global industry can safely and securely do business with one another and their customers. It will include built-in services and protocols for B2B communications, trading, commerce, publishing, fulfillment, merchandising, and more. All services will be fully hosted and managed by the network. It will be strictly access controlled and all identities will be known and traceable.

Over time the network will evolve its own economy – certainly also its own currency. Subscription fee levels will provide access to varying levels of service, support, performance, and industry data. Economic indicators will be trivial to measure.

Owning a presence on the network will be standardised and commoditised. Advertising will be centrally administered and metered to agreed levels. Spam won’t exist.

It might be called something like gnet. Google has been buying up physical telecommunications capacity for the last 4 years. It also has literally millions of CPUs all connected up to serve as the network computing platform already capable of driving this type of service. Microsoft will probably launch its own version too - in response. Its platform may evolve out of its recently announced Azure cloud computing system or its Sharepoint services, or a combination of the two.

The Internet as we know it today will slowly start to degenerate. Telecommunication companies that today are providing free resources to keep it available will start questioning those investments and begin to pull out. Government legislation that ensures continued Internet operation and cooperation will do the same as those people and businesses who can afford it start to switch to the much better performing and more user friendly commercial networks. The number of interconnected machines and available bandwidth will eventually reach a low tipping point until collapse is inevitable. Not unlike what we are seeing with free-to-air television today.

But the diehard founding Internet users will stick around. The open sourcers, the linux heads, the geeks, nerds and hackers, the free-as-in-speechers, the p2p’ers, will all hold out for as long as possible. The universities will stay with them too, for a while, at least while their funding holds out. But they too will eventually be forced to move on, attracted to the commercial networks by financial incentives to their students.

With the corporate conservatives and their stuffy legislation gone the Internet will turn somewhat anarchistic in its dying days. An experimental free-for-all where almost anything goes. This will continue until the last network backbone is finally decommissioned and the Internet will be proclaimed officially dead. TV networks will run documentaries of its history.

The geeks and hackers will move to fully independent peer-2-peer wireless networks that are already in the makings.

Moving forward multitudes of inter-networks will start popping up. Many of the big companies who can afford it will start to lease their own lines and launch their own network oriented products. Each network will be built on specific custom protocols with their own advantage for a niche business vertical and market differentiation. FaceNet will be the internet for personal friend interaction, BayNet for auctions.

After a while however, and grudgingly, the commercial inter-networks will realize that no single one of them can control all verticals and they will be forced to cooperate and form a standard set of protocols for inter-network communication. This will be similar to the Instant Messenger protocol race we have seen over the last 10 years and VHS vs Betamax before that.

Once the standard is established a pure standard-based network will launch and push out the rest and we will back at the beginning with a single global network once again. Long live the Internet.