Morgan Stanley has released the 2010 edition of State of the Internet (pdf) report. The report primarily highlights the exponential growth of the mobile web in coming years. It hints that Mobile Will Be Bigger Than Desktop Internet in 5 Years and then takes a deep dive into mobile internet. The report shares deep analysis of the following:

1.Wealth Creation / Destruction is Material in New Computing Cycles – Now in Early Innings of Mobile Internet Cycle, the 5th Cycle of Last Half Century.
2.Mobile Ramping Faster than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think – 5 Trends Converging (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices).
3.Apple Leading in Mobile Innovation + Impact, for Now – Depth of App Ecosystems + User Experience + Pricing Will Determine Long-Term Winners.
4.Game-Changing Communications / Commerce Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) Emerging Very Rapidly.
5.Massive Data Growth Driving Carrier / Equipment Transitions.
6.Growth / Monetization Roadmaps Provided by Japan Mobile + Desktop Internet.

The report is authored by Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt and  Liang Wu and more is available about the report on GigaOm

Image Credit : Morgan Stanely

Pew Internet has released a new report The Internet’s impact on Institutions of the Future which shows that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.

    * “By 2020, innovative forms of online cooperation will result in significantly more efficient and responsive governments, business, non-profits, and other mainstream institutions.”

Some 26% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

    * ”By 2020, governments, businesses, non-profits and other mainstream institutions will primarily retain familiar 20th century models for conduct of relationships with citizens and consumers online and offline.”

While their overall assessment anticipates that humans’ use of the internet will prompt institutional change, many elaborated with written explanations that expressed significant concerns over organization’s resistance to change. They cited fears that bureaucracies of all stripes – especially government agencies – can resist outside encouragement to evolve. Some wrote that the level of change will affect different kinds of institutions at different times. The consensus among them was that businesses will transform themselves much more quickly than public and non-profit agencies.

Many selected the “change” option, but said they were not sure drastic change will occur in organizations by the 2020 time frame. They said the most significant impact of the internet on institutions will occur after that. Some noted this change will cause tension and disruption.

The respondents who addressed the issue of “innovative forms of online cooperation” sometimes referred to activities between people and institutions that were post-bureaucratic. They argued that people could use the internet and cell phones to create alternative, un-bureaucratic structures to solve problems through network-structured communities.

Download the pdf version here

Daniel Calingaert writes an excellent piece Authoritaiansim vs. the Internet for the latest issue of Hoover Institutes Policy Review. Daniel Calingaert is deputy director of programs at Freedom House, which receives funding from the U.S. State Department, Google, and other sources to promote internet freedom:

The role of the internet in Iran following the June 2009 presidential election raises a fundamental question: Will the internet bring freedom to oppressed people or can it be controlled so that it cannot threaten the hold on power of repressive regimes? The internet has provided greater space for free expression in countries where traditional broadcast and print media are restricted. It has increased opportunities to enrich public discourse, expose abuses of power, and facilitate citizen activism. The open nature of the internet challenges the ability of repressive regimes to thwart expressions of dissent and political opposition.

Authoritarian rulers understand the power of the internet and are actively curtailing its impact. A few countries — Burma, Cuba, North Korea, and Turkmenistan — restrict internet access to a very small segment of the population. They have few public internet access points, and the cost of internet service is prohibitive for the vast majority of citizens.

Other countries, such as China, Iran, and Tunisia, actively promote internet use as a way to stimulate innovation and economic growth, but they place wide-ranging controls over digital media to prevent them from being used for political opposition. They maintain extensive, multilayered systems of censorship and surveillance to stifle online dissent. These systems place severe limits on politically sensitive content that citizens can access, post on the internet, and transmit via mobile phones. Surveillance of internet and mobile phone communications is pervasive, and citizens who criticize the government online are subject to harassment, imprisonment, and torture.

Freedom House has also published a study Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media. It lists country wise status of freedom and the internet

As internet and mobile phone use explodes worldwide, governments are adopting new and multiple means for controlling these technologies that go far beyond technical filtering. Freedom on the Net provides a comprehensive look at these emerging tactics, raising concern over trends such as the "outsourcing of censorship" to private companies, the use of surveillance and the manipulation of online conversations by undercover agents. The study covers both repressive countries such as China and Iran and democratic ones such as India and the United Kingdom, finding some degree of internet censorship and control in all 15 nations studied.

ITIF is marking the 25th anniversary of the very first .com with a comprehensive report, "The Internet Economy 25 Years After .Com: Transforming Life and Commerce." (pdf available for download) You can celebrate the 25th anniversary of dotcom on the very aptly named website – www.25yearsof.com

Some of the things that you will find in this report

• Of the roughly 250 million websites about 80 million are .coms. Even after the collapse of the .dom bubble, the number of domain names grows by an average of 668,000 a month.
• The .coms alone account for some $400 million in economic benefits to businesses and consumers and that figure will likely double in the next ten years.
• Despite high-profile failures in the dot-com bubble burst, typical survival rates for these new businesses were actually higher than normal and spectacular success stories have followed.
• Only about 25 percent of the world’s 6.7 billion participate in the dot-com economy but is changing – 73 million Chinese became Internet users in 2007 alone.

In order to sustain the progress that has been made in empowering consumers, spurring innovations and boosting productivity, the report urges:

• Adoption of policies that allow for the deployment of technologies, like wired and wireless broadband, mobile payments platforms, health IT, and other Internet platforms.
• Removal of regulatory and legal barriers to the emergence of new e-business models.
• Creation of incentives for companies to invest in Internet-enabled business practices.
• Advancing digital literacy.

[via @25yearsofdotcom ]

Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Couple of years back he had authored the book "The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It ". His book is now available for download (pdf). At this time unfortunately Zittrain is in hospital and wish him swift and smooth recovery. About the book:

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk.

The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

Doc searls informs about The Future of the Internet IV, the study conducted by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. Survey respondents shared thousands of issues-exposing predictive statements tied to five "tension pairs" projecting their attitudes about the likely state of things in 2020. Experts were asked about the Internet and the evolution of: intelligence; reading and the rendering of knowledge; identity and authentication; gadgets and applications; and the core values of the Internet. The 45-page briefing as a PDF is available for downloaded here. In this report, you will find experts’ thoughts on the following issues:

1. Will Google make us stupid?
2. Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?
3. Will social relations get better?
4. Will the state of reading and writing be improved?
5. Will those in GenY share as much information about themselves as they age?
6. Will our relationship to key institutions change?
7. Will online anonymity still be prevalent?
8. Will the Semantic Web have an impact?
9. Are the next takeoff technologies evident now?
10. Will the Internet still be dominated by the end-to-end principle?

I am a big fan Slashdot.org, the original mob destination for nerds and what else can be the better way to start this blog by posting my submission which was accepted there.

santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he’s also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious.

“6. We know that the Internet creates ‘information overload,’ a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it’s more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won’t be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. … 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.”

Also cross-posted on Slashdot