Corporation for National Research Initiatives

Today, when researching answers for our first Assignment, my surfing led me to the website of CNRI, and in particular, the 1999 paper by Kahn and Cerf entitled What Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work). This provided valuable insights for the Assignment, but what I also found fascinating was its predictions for the next ten years, given that it was written ten years ago!

Kahn and Cerf correctly anticipated huge growth in the internet, much higher transmission speeds, and the net's penetration into other devices like telephones, but they largely seem to have missed the evolution of what we now call Web 2.0. They anticipated issues with intellectual property (which immediately brings to mind the phenomenon of Google Books), but don't appear to have considered the interactivity and user-participation that Web 2.0 promises and indeed provides.

It's easy to have 20:20 hindsight, not so straightforward to have clear forsight, and I'm not meaning to criticise these authors for their lack of clairvoyance. However, it will surely always be interesting to look retrospectively at predictions made in the past of what our current world will be like!