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Presaging this, the organisers recently invited me to attend a roundtable event to discuss three specific aspects of Sir Tim’s vision: what the 2050 web will mean from a personal perspective, what it will mean for enterprises, and what the social and economic impact might be.

It will come as no surprise that no definitive conclusions were arrived at in 90 minutes. However, on more than one occasion, people featured as the strong influencing component representing opportunity and limitation. Significantly, there appears to be a growing generational divide, and it was suggested that there is a younger generation who will spurn risk in favour of content or functionality.

Moving our attention to what might be called Web topography, some felt that a single Web would prevail and others that segmentation was not only inevitable but that the first significant segmentation had already occurred with the so-called Dark Web or Darknet.

I don't have the space to expand on this here other than to say this. The web in 2050 is actually unimaginable today, and any attempt to envision it overlooks past failure to do the same over much shorter periods. That said, the web is evolving and new generations of people are experiencing it from a previously unexperienced perspective. Enterprise, business and personal requirements have collided and blurred any edges (and there were never many) and in the future all the risk and all of the opportunity available to the world is likely to be found through one public place: the web.

I suspect that most consumers of the web won't spend too much time postulating this, but for IT and networking professionals it is truly another matter as network boundaries dissolve further, expectations increase exponentially and the human being possibly becomes a limiting factor to its progress.

Ray Smyth - Editor, Network Computing.
Ray.Smyth@BTC.CO.UK | https://twitter.com/ItsRay