Net Threats

According to experts canvassed by Pew Internet and American Life Project, the biggest threats aren't a rise in hacking attacks or new waves of Internet crime. They're government and big online corporations.

Control and consolidation were the top threats for experts canvassed by Pew's Internet and American Life Project. Pew asked more than 1,400 experts -- academics, theorists and those who work in the technology industry -- to weigh in on what risks the Internet faces through 2025. The majority pointed to government surveillance, restrictive regulation and corporate greed as the things most likely to kill the idea that the Web is a free-flowing network of information. Plenty expressed concern that the Internet will fracture due to government policies, such as those that limit access to the Web as some governments did during the Arab Spring, aggressive intellectual property laws or even well-meaning policies in Canada and Australia that aggressively filter all Internet traffic to combat child pornography. These efforts, experts said, cross the line -- or at least flirt with it.

The These Experts Fear are:

• Actions by nation-states to maintain security and political control will lead to more blocking, filtering, segmentation, and balkanization of the Internet.
• Trust will evaporate in the wake of revelations about government and corporate surveillance and likely greater surveillance in the future.
• Commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life.
• Efforts to fix the TMI (too much information) problem might over-compensate and actually thwart content sharing.