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A year of browsers - and censors
Published 18 December 2008
A year of browsers - and censors
If the internet were a country, futurology would be its national sport. At about this time of year, predictions abound online of where the net will go in the next 12 months. In a space that has been defined by rapid innovation, making pronouncements about what is about to happen is a dangerous game. Indeed, one of the more curious features of the web in 2008 was the rise of online prediction markets, such as Hubdub.com, where users bet virtual money on future events in the worlds of politics, sport and technology. In a stroke of marketing genius, Hubdub's makers launched PunditWatch, a project that tracked predictions made by major tech pundits such as Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch against actual events as they unfolded.
The results? Even the experts only got it right half the time.
This year, any predictions made about the development of the digital world will be set against that other favourite of amateur augurs, the global financial meltdown. Those small- to medium-sized web enterprises that have yet to be bought by Google, Microsoft or eBay (think Digg) will be keeping a close eye on the bank balances of their venture capitalist funders next year. And although the boom in so-called Web 2.0 start-ups has not suffered from the sort of debt-fuelled decimation associated with the dotcom bust of the late 1990s, there's likely to be at least one high-profile fold in the coming year.
Enjoy what you can of the internet in 2009, because by 2010 the western world could find itself censored in earnest
But a downturn isn't all bad news for consumers. Newly unemployed techies who don't find cushy gigs at the BBC (and with Auntie's online budget still recovering from the £36m deficit identified by the BBC Trust last summer, there will be a few of those) will go back to their bedrooms. You don't need venture capitalists to innovate online, and the results of bedroom hacking can often move mountains: the core team behind Last.fm, the UK online music success story of 2007, built the company up gradually in the years after the first dotcom crash. Services which save consumers money - from Skype to Moneysupermarket.com - will also continue to grow in popularity as times become tight.
The predicted decline in advertising revenue might affect the steady stream of legal music and film download services emerging on web and mobile platforms. But this is a market that dances to its own tune - and the fall in recorded music and film sales could start to turn around next year, as the industry continues to work on winning consumers back from illicit file-sharing networks. The lack of cross-border licensing schemes in the European Union, which currently keeps commercial on-demand services like Hulu.com imprisoned on the other side of the Atlantic, will take more than a year to sort out, as will the industry's love affair with exclusive deals (see Nokia's recent "Comes With Music" package, which offers subscribers unlimited downloads from an extensive catalogue). For the consumer, then, 2009 will continue to be a confusing jumble of communications and media platforms, each one with its own file format to deal with, not to mention its own charger to get tangled up in a mess at the bottom of the drawer.
With Google's recent launch of the Android phone, a direct competitor to Apple's iPhone, the race to write compelling mobile applications will be a feature of 2009. Many of these will offer location-based services that take advantage of these phones' GPS tracking features, such as advertising, micro-blogging and even programmes that tell you where your friends are at any given moment. A lot of them will be brokered using Yahoo!'s relatively privacy-friendly geo-data control service, FireEagle.
This year's beta launch of Google Chrome also signals greater competition in the market, this time for web browsers. Using the web for applications such as email, word processing and media storage has now become the norm (just one facet of the so-called "cloud computing" meme that allows software developers to deploy their systems from the internet, and which captured the tech imagination in 2008). This means our choice of web browser will soon be more important than, say, which operating system we opt for. As such, the major players will compete for our attention with jazzy interfaces (Chrome), useful add-ons (Firefox) and privacy-enhancing features (Windows IE8). The question of who owns the data we store online - us or the companies we store with - will also become a mainstream issue in 2009.
While companies begin to respond to the privacy concerns of internet users with new products, the government, which in a parallel universe we might expect to safeguard our right to privacy, will instead be looking at how to regulate what we look at online. The former Ofcom chief executive Stephen (now Lord) Carter, now the junior minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, will head a new "Digital Britain" initiative, a fast-tracked review that brings two sacred cows of internet policy - free speech and net neutrality - under threat. Next year could well be the year the western world starts to censor the net in earnest, motivated in equal parts by corporate lobbying and moral panic. So enjoy what you can of the unpredictable web in 2009, because by 2010, clunky regulation might have slowed the pace of innovation considerably.
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