Towards a Future Internet Interrelation between Technological, Social and Economic Trends

Interim Report, European Commission DG INFSO Project SMART 2008/0049, February 2010

The internet has become the basis for global trade and culture, fundamental to the global economy, and this over a very short space of time. It has also gone mobile, available in more places and on more devices than ever before. In consequence, a quarter of the world’s population, use the internet either at work or in their social lives. This dependence on the internet as a daily tool has tremendous social and economic impact. If we look at technology that has driven socio-economic change – from the railways to our electricity supply to television – none has become so core to everyday life, so fast. In roughly twelve years, since the 'browser wars', the internet has become the foundation of not just our economy but of a widening of human culture and a form of social awakening. The fact that technology has become a vital, and even intimate, part of human existence in such a short time is unprecedented. It must be noted as well that the internet came into being precisely because it was not purely corporate or state-controlled.
The principal task of this project is to map the most likely developmental paths of the future internet. The present document is a summary of the project’s Interim Report, which gives an account of the work conducted so far on the identification of needs and requirements of a future internet (i.e. Work Package 2 of 3). This represents the creative part of the project and included the development of scenarios to forecast possible directions for the future. The scenarios and the needs analysis are perhaps the most important elements of the Interim Report.
Much of the analysis on the future of the internet tends to focus on technological aspects. In this study, we give much more importance to the demand side and to the linkages between technology and socio-economic factors.
The project used foresight techniques including environmental scanning to identify trends and drivers of change, a Delphi survey of experts in the domain, and a scenario building methodology with brainstorming and scenario validation workshops.