It won’t be global anymore, the USA will have its own local-version, china, Europe, Russia too. The pressure on manipulative social media will increase, meta, alphabet etc will be banned more and more. As part of this WWW3, sea cables will be cut, causing outages.

Regions will be walled off by censorship / content laws, freely accessible information will be a thing of the past, you'll have to pay a subscription for anything you want to do, and you will own nothing.

I feel like it's possible that there will be a shift away from the internet. It feels like we're racing to enshittifying the internet as much as possible and eventually that will just be the assumption people have at every corner and it just won't be something people turn to unless they have a task to complete that requires it. Even when the reason for enshittification isn't corporate greed it's to propaganda bots or the miraculous ability of one person to ruin everything for surprisingly large groups.

That's honestly my most hopeful take. I've got a lot of books on raising goats. Might get some donkeys.

Great Firewall of America

Great Firewall of EU

Going to a dark alleyway to pay a hooded man for a VPN access code he writes on a crumbled sheet of paper

Hopefully still here. With a possible war on the horizon it may get disconnected and/or walled off.

Our local community is thinking of making a mesh net.

We will enter a period where you aren't allowed online unless you present a government issued identification as proof of age and/or national origin.

• More IPv6 deployment.

• Whack-a-mole with automated bots on social media. The war with spam email was a long one. This one may be too. My guess is that in the end, the bots will lose out, maybe via some kind of zero-knowledge proof of identity stuff.

• YouTube cracking down on ad-blocking.

• Continued rise of dark-mode interfaces.

• Either a general acceptance of least-common-denominator stuff (e.g. accepting that one can't restrict what content is visible that might come from some other country) or an increasing number of countries mandating that their ISPs block stuff that they want blocked. If the blocking happens, probably an increase in use of software that seeks to evade such blocking.

I do wonder a bit what the impact will be from the shift we've seen from PCs being the primary way to access the Internet to mobile devices. Like, for example:

https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/touch-typing-learn-practice-gen-z-speed-rjhlvrb00

In 2000, 44% of American high school students had taken a keyboard skills course, but by 2019 this had fallen to 2.5%.

In the US, teachers say that they have often assumed that young people can type because they spend so long with their devices. But students say they often use tablet devices or their phones instead, making them proficient at scrolling and tapping, but less skilled at typing.

If the ability to touch-type goes into serious decline, the ability to enter text rapidly will as well, and I'd expect that to have various knock-on effects in UI; brevity of input text may become more important.

• Images and video becoming less proof-of-truth. We can synthesize pretty good photograph-looking images of things now. Probably going to get there with video, too. My bet is that the advantage is and will be on the side of synthesizing content, not of detecting that an image is synthesized. We might need to go back to the era before we had recording devices, when we relied upon specialized, trustworthy people putting their reputation on the line to attest to things. Maybe that, rather than photographs or video, will be what we see on Web pages to show that something is true.

Some things that I don't expect to see:

• The rise of VR as the primary mechanism to navigate the Internet, a la the Metaverse in Snow Crash or the probably-named-after-it Metaverse that Facebook's banged on. Various people have tried various implementations, and it hasn't caught on. I am skeptical that it makes a lot of sense

working in 2D works pretty well for most things.

• Voice interaction becoming the primary mode of communication or computer control, not unless we get some sort of sensors and systems that can pick up subvocalization or something. You can't control software near other people via voice without being obnoxious.

Even more shit because very very few people are actively trying to improve anything

People being critisized is the least of the internets' problems at the moment. Hopefully there'll be a sucessful backlash against all the ai and the algorithms and the corporatization and the censorship (actual censorship, not "people getting offended") soon or else all that will be left is advertising.

I'm starting to see this amongst my techie friends: invite only enclaves. Like, using matrix or signal chats that are only by invite; Jellyfin servers for streaming, again, among friends. Group cloud services like nextcloud, mail servers cut off from email at large... Internet-like services, but for small groups.

People will be anti-internet and build communities again. Then we take down the fascist regime.