Imagining the Internet

A vision for the future

This is one of nearly a thousand foresight statements shared by people from around the world. To return to the Voices of the People home page, click here. To do a refined search of the Voices of the People statements, click here. To submit your ideas to this online archive, look to the upper right corner of this page, click on "Share Your Prediction" and fill in the pop-up form.

Name: Craig R. Evers

From: Virginia

Bio: Government researcher

Area of Expertise: Advocate/Voice of the People

Topic: General, Overarching Remarks

Headline: The end of the internet

Nutshell: The internet as we know it ends by 2015 because of demographics.

Vision: A good portion of the developed, industrial world is already online, and the internet occasionally buckles under the current usage. Emerging market economies, particularly China and the ASEAN countries, will see dramatic surges in demand for internet usage as their economies expand and the benefits thereof move from the industrial centers out to the less-developed (but still heavily populated) rural areas.

Barring serious advances in network infrastructure, the internet as we know it will be unable to support the millions upon millions of users from China and ASEAN as the internet becomes available to the masses. This burden spreads through the system, ending the internet as we know it.

Date Submitted: 11/11/2004