WASHINGTON — Two seminal figures of the digital communication era said Thursday that in the next couple decades they expect the Internet to work its way into all aspects of modern life.
Speaking before a sizable crowd of tech-centric business executives Thursday at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, Va. , AOL co-founder Steve Case and “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, who helped design the basic architecture of the Web in the 1970s, discussed future technology trends, rising privacy concerns, and the Internet’s impact on culture and society.
“The first 25 years was really about building the platform and making the Internet part of everyday life,” Case said, when asked to encapsulate the past and future of the Internet. “The next 25 years is how that really infiltrates and impacts, in very positive ways, every aspect of life.”
Neither Case nor Cerf made many specific predictions about the Internet’s impact on the future of society or the prospects of exciting new gizmos, citing the myriad of unforeseeable social implications stemming from the evolution of technology. But the overriding element of the future that each speaker envisions is a technology experience more specifically tailored to the individual as it relates to search, advertising and modes of interaction
A site like Twitter, Case said, that has begun to operate more as a vehicle to share interesting links than divulge mundane private information, might evolve to serve as a highly relevant news outlet.
“Aggregating the links of people that you care about could create, what in essence is, more of a personalized newswire – and that to me is more interesting than what algorithms from many different sites, Google News and others, are going to create for me,” Case said.
Don Rippert, CTO of global technology consulting firm Accenture, also contributed to the discussion, which was hosted by e-newsletter publisher Bisnow.
Rippert predicted that a decline in existing Internet ad revenue streams would soon lead to the end of traditional network neutrality.
“I think as you get into the Internet there’s going to be tiers,” he said. “There’s going to be a tier where you’re going to pay a subscription. Where you’re going to say, ‘I want to know it’s true. I want to know it’s factual.’ I’m not just looking at some blog site that I’m not sure who wrote it. I want some validation to it. And I’m willing to pay a little bit to get that validation.”
Cerf, who serves as the chief Internet evangelist for Google, said he disagreed with the rationale that paying for content guaranteed its validity or that existing ad revenue models were almost tapped, but acknowledged that the Internet could support a tiered pay model and said that Google was exploring alternative pay options.
He said increasingly targeted product placement in the future would pose an interesting sales opportunity. Cerf asked the audience to imagine watching an interactive commercial for Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, for which the viewer could click the screen and instantly receive directions to the nearest Apple store and up-to-date inventory statistics.
“What you’ve just done is engaged the viewer beyond the typical product placement to allow the viewer to take action,” he said.
That enhanced personal engagement may even lead to nationwide health care benefits, Case said.
He believes that by providing patients with more personalized, real-time health information, they’ll grow more engaged in their own health, which will in turn reduce the number of costly medical emergency situations.
“How do you predict [emergencies] in advance?” he asked. “You can’t always do that, but there are usually some things that if you were monitoring you’d be able to say ‘Wait a minute. Ding. Ding. Ding. Something’s going on here.’ And have a family member call and ask somebody something and essentially pre-empt a much more serious incident that could be life-threatening and also could be very expensive.”
For Case, who currently heads the principal investment firm Revolution LLC, the next frontier for Internet will be when it becomes “invisible” – that is, when it is taken for granted.
“Major parts of our everyday life, or phenomena of 50 or 100 years ago, like electricity and water, are taken for granted most of the time. They’re just there,” Case said. “[Internet] really will have arrived, in terms of that level of ubiquity, when it’s so prevalent that [e-mail and e-commerce] just become mail and commerce.”
That day is not here yet, he said. But it is likely coming.