Looking into the Crystal Ball: Ubiquous Mobility, RFID and the Internet of Things

About the future of the Internet, Ambassador Yrjö Lansipuro from the Finnish Foreign Ministry made the introduction to this very interesting panel.

The official program description is:

QUOTE
With 1.4 billion internet users worldwide, the growth rate of the Domain Name Market is further expanding. The convergence between internet and mobile phone services opens doors for innovation and creative applications.

Unexpected market niches emerge, new services are developed. After years of discussion, the new generation networks are becoming a reality, linking more and more mobile devices and innovative services to the internet.

Web 2.0, user generated content, RFID, Internet of things, ONS etc. are the catchwords of the future. How the internet will look like in the year 2010 and beyond? This session discusses and “speculates” about the next waves.

Moderation: Yrjö Lansipuro, Finnish Foreign Ministry, Ambassador, Helsinki

Key Note: David W. Maher, Senior Vice President, Law & Policy, Public Interest Registry (PIR), Chicago

Panelist: Daniel Kofman, Paris Tech, EURO-Network of the Future
Bernard Benhamou, French Ministry of Higher Research, Paris
Pat Kane, VeriSign, Global Public Policy and Government Relations, Mountain View
Elmar Knipp, Knipp Kommunikation, Chair of the Board, DENIC, Frankfurt
Phlipp Grabensee, Afilias Ltd., Chair of the Board, Düsseldorf

Comments: Jean Jacques Subrenat, ICANN Director, Paris

UNQUOTE

How will the Internet will work like in the year 2010? Before we reply to that question, is there going to be an Internet in, say, 5 years from now?

For the panelists, although the answer is yes the speed of change will be increased. Also, the question could be rephrased as how different the Internet will be - will we still have domain names? It will be more and more about users, and not numbers.

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Watch the excellent presentation by keynote speaker David Maher, who quotes Zittrain's The Future of the Internet - for those of you who follow Zittrain's work this is the evolution of the paper ¨The Generative Internet¨ and Maher points out very vivid and strong arguments. Definitely worth watching this.

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As the conference happened in September 2008, the Kaminsky attack was a very hot issue and its implications are also mentioned by Maher.

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Elmar Knipp, Chairman of the Board of Knipp Kommunikation, made a brilliant and creative presentation with clear concepts on the trusted and untrusted Internet, sensors as the new group of ¨users¨ (in other words, devices, and not humans will be more and more connected to the Internet).

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Knipp continues his presentation mentioning how great things such as search engines, Skype, Wikipedia and social networking were not directly impacted by institutions such as ICANN or the IGF process. So these have not been important in the sense of innovation and will continue to be ¨unimportant¨ for innovation. In the next years a lot of data mining will be happening. Finally there will be increasing dependence of the Internet.

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Pat Kane, Global Public Policy and Government Relations of VeriSign, reminded the audience that 2010 will be the first year that ICANN can be out of the JPA. It will be an interesting year. We will have our first real new TLDs. How many we will let out will be the question.

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Bernard Benhamou, French Minister of Higher Research made his presentation announcing an event in Nice and a visionary approach on the mobile Internet.

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At the end of the session, comments were made by Jean Jacques Subrenat, ICANN Director.

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