This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Until we have faster broadband speeds and access across the whole world, we can only dream of the web's potential.
The one key thing that will affect the web (and the world) over the next few years is the incredible explosion of growth in the internet in the developing world. I carry around with me a Huawei Ideos smartphone that sells for $50 (£30) in Kenya -- and there are hundreds of thousands of these in Africa. The boom we've experienced is now going to happen there.
When people talk about mobile in Africa, South America and elsewhere, they usually go on about something they have read in The Guardian about a farmer being able to see the market price for his crops, or a malaria alert. That's true enough, but leads people to think of Africa as an alien place. The big sites in Africa belong to Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, local papers and so on. And the exciting thing is that all these people joining the web will bring with them something different and unknown. We couldn't have predicted the success of "Gangnam Style", with its lyrics in Korean. And I don't think we can predict what will come out of Africa, not only culturally, but technologically too.
10 more experts comment in our Web at 25 series...
What we do know is that we will see an increase in bandwidth.
This will be important in both the developed and the developing world. At home in Florida I have 150Mbps down -- which I really wish I could get in London, by the way -- and 65Mbps up, which completely changes your backup strategy. All my stuff is in the cloud. That's important but it's nowhere near as important as the jump between zero and 3G. And I am excited, of course, about what that will mean for communities online. We've seen how internet use happens in two waves. First, people are consumers -- visiting sites, getting news, watching videos. But then they start being producers too and all those people will be contributing to the web.
My biggest worry -- and the biggest threat to the web -- is that we will start Balkanising it. Countries will start to cordon off their bits of the internet. And that will be a disaster. We need to be alert to this and make sure it doesn't happen. Encryption helps -- what you read on Wikipedia, for instance, is your business and no one else's -- but we also need to rein in the US National Security Agency. Otherwise the next 25 years of the web are going to be very different from the last.
Jimmy Wales is cofounder of Wikipedia and Wikia hosting.
More from Wired's Web at 25 series
- Tim Berners-Lee: the past, present and future
- Marc Andreessen: embed the internet
- Mikko Hypponen: government surveillance
- Joi Ito: 'it's a living, evolving organism'
- Nigel Shadbolt: augmented intelligence
- Keren Elazari: biocomputing mechanisms
- Vint Cerf: internet of things
- Nick D'Aloisio: natural language
- Ze Frank: 8 things to expect next
- Arianna Huffington: the net grows up
- 8 internet memes you forgot you shared
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
