Future of the Internet

Since the creation of the Internet, it has been changing constantly. The main focus and capitalization around it right now is advertising. All this advertising causes privacy issues as it becomes targeted to specific markets, households, individuals, etc. As of right now, Google is the biggest player in the search engine game. With over 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) web pages indexed and search algorithms that everybody else envies, they have mastered the search engine market.

Google is by far the biggest search engine on the internet with over 65% of the market. With new projects like Google Latitude and the Android mobile operating system Google has shown that it is always on the leading edge of technology and that it is not afraid to enter new types of markets.

My honest opinion is that Google needs no second act. The way they are going and all the different projects that they are developing, their act is a continuous work in progress which evolves at the pace that Googler's decide.

The major player that Google should be worried about is Microsoft. They are out to redeem their Live Search product which is still to prove itself. This is one of the main reasons it is beleived that Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo, it would be a very quick way to increase their Internet Search share and advertisement revenues.

Search engine companies have also started indexing the "Deep Web" which are web sites that had never been indexed before. This is being done, as always, to add more volume to their indexed sites and by that adding internet share percentage but most importantly to increase advertisement revenue which is the most important revenue for any search engine company.

If your intellectual property concerns you with all these changes, you are right to be worried. Some companies are trying to grab as much property as they can from their users. A very recent example of this is Facebook. Facebook's Terms Of Service was changed so they could basically do "Anything they wanted" with the content their users posted on their site. This outraged their users to the point that Facebook had to retract the changes to their TOS and now plans to run every futur change by their users before making it official.

Thankfully Facebook users noticed the change and were able to complaint before Facebook could benefit from their intellectual property. This is one of the reasons why Internet users should always be aware of the Terms Of Service for services that they sign up for.

Another issue is censorship on the internet. Many countries are now censoring what their citizens can and cannot see on the internet. These efforts were first started by China but now have been propagated to other countries such as Egypt. This "Internet Repression" is used to prevent free specch in countries and have more control of what their citizens can read from situations in other parts of the world. This is also expanding to limit the free speech of Bloggers in other parts of the world which makes it equally difficult to learn unaltered information about other countries.

Sources used for this post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web#Future
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6724531.stm
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9838695-16.html
http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever