The evolution of the device for connection:  “People in Africa turned paid telephone minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency…There are already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth.” —Howard Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of “Virtual Community” and “Smart Mobs”

“By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been disintermediated. We'll have standard network connections around the world…Billions of people will have joined the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’ either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.” —Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member

“Traditional carriers have little incentive to include poor populations, and the next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will win.” —danah boyd, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society

“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.” —Josh Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine and longtime technology journalist and editor

The evolution of social tolerance: “Not in mankind’s nature. The first global satellite link-up was 1967, BBC's Our World: the Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and we still have war, genocide, and assassination (Lennon's poignantly).” —Adam Peake, policy analyst for the Center for Global Communications and participant in the World Summit on the Information Society

“Polarization will continue and the people on the extremes will be less tolerant of those opposite them. At the same time, within homogenous groups (religious, political, social, financial, etc.) greater tolerance will likely occur.” —Don Heath, Internet pioneer and former president and CEO of the Internet Society

“Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one's real-world surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one's online clan.” —Jim Horning, chief scientist for information security at SPARTA Inc. and a founder of InterTrust’s Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory

The evolution of intellectual property law and copyright: “Many people want IP protection, but everyone wants to steal. Regardless of the legal mechanisms so far—e.g., automatic damages, compulsory copyrights—many people would prefer the illegal route, perhaps because it runs up their adrenaline.” —Michael Botein, founding director of the Media Law Center at New York University Law School

“Copying data is the natural state of computers; we would have to try to compromise them too much to support this regime.” —Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

“While I applaud the efforts of DRM [digital rights management] opponents, I am discouraged by the progress DRM seems to continue to make in hardware as much as in software. Having purchased an iPhone, I was delighted when Apple updated its software to allow custom ringtones, only to discover that I needed to pay for a ringtone via the iTunes Music Store even though the ringtone I wanted to use was one in which I own the copyright!” —Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and editor of New Media & Society

“There will be cross-linking of content provider giants and Internet service provider giants and that they will find ways to milk every last ‘currency unit’ out of the unwitting and defenseless consumer. Governments will be strongly influenced by the business conglomerates and will not do much to protect consumers. (Just think of the outrageous rates charged by cable and phone company TV providers and wireless phone providers today—it will only get worse.)” —Steve Goldstein, ICANN board member formerly of the US National Science Foundation

“Copyright is a dead duck in a digital world. The old regime based its power on high distribution costs. Those costs are going to zero. Bye-bye DRM.” —Dan Lynch, founder of CyberCash and Interop Company, now a board member of the Santa Fe Institute

“You cannot stop a tide with a spoon. Cracking technology will always be several steps ahead of DRM and content will be redistributed on anonymous networks.” —Giulio Prisco, chief executive of Metafuturing Second Life, formerly of CERN

The evolution of privacy and transparency: “We will enter a time of mutually assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses. That will be positive for tolerance and understanding, but—even more important—I believe that young people will not lose touch with their friends as my generation did and that realization of permanence in relationships could—or should—lead to more care in those relationships.” —Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism

“Gen Y has a new notion of privacy. The old ‘never trust anyone over 30’ will turn into ‘never trust anyone who doesn't have embarrassing stuff online.’” —Jerry Michalski, founder and president of Sociate

“Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will continue to happen.” —Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and director of computer services at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

“By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and manipulation will have largely disappeared.” —Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough Type blog and “The Big Switch”

“The volume and ubiquity of personal information, clicktrails, personal media, etc., will desensitize us. A super-abundance of transparency will lose its ability to shock. Maybe there will be software-driven real-time reputation insurance service, offering monitoring and repair to dinged reputations. This could be as ordinary as auto insurance or mortgage insurance is today, and as automated as the nightly backups performed by most online businesses. I don't agree that this will make us any kinder.” —Havi Hoffman, Yahoo Developer Network

The evolution of augmented and virtual reality:   “Mirror worlds are multi-dimensional experiences with profound implications for education, medicine, and social interaction. ‘Real life’ as we know it is over. Soon when anyone mentions reality, the first question we will ask is, ‘Which reality are you referring to?’ We will choose our realities, and in each reality there will be truths germane to that reality, and so we will choose our truth as well.”—Barry Chudakov, principal with the Chudakov Company

“We in the present don't think of ourselves as living in ‘cyberspace,’ even though people of a decade previous would have termed it such. Of the various forms of the metaverse, however, the majority of activity will take place in blended or augmented-reality spaces, not in distinct virtual/alternative world spaces.” —Jamais Cascio, a co-author of the “Metaverse Roadmap Overview,” a report on the potential futures of VR, AR, and the geoWeb

“Augmented reality will become nearly the de facto interface standard by 2020, with 2-D and 3-D overlays over real-world objects providing rich information, context, entertainment, and (yes) promotions and offers. At the same time, a metaverse (especially when presented in an augmented-reality-overlay environment) provides compelling ways to facilitate teamwork and collaboration while reducing overall travel budgets.” —Jason Stoddard, managing partner at Centric/Agency of Change

“The virtual world removes all barriers of human limitation; you can be anyone you want to be instead of being bound by physical and material limitations. That allows people to be who they naturally are, freed of any perception they may have of themselves based on their ‘real life’—it is the power of removing the barriers of your own perception of yourself.” —Tze-Meng Tan, Multimedia Development Corporation in Malaysia, a director at OpenSOS

“We are in the last generation of human fighter pilots. Already, drones in Iraq are piloted in San Diego. What will improve is the ability of the artificial spaces to control physical reality, to expand our reach more effectively in many aspects of the physical universe.” —Dick Davies, partner at Project Management and Control Inc. and a past president of the Association of Information Technology Professionals

“In a reaction to the virtual world, entrepreneurs will establish ‘virt-free’ zones where reality is not augmented. In various heavily connected areas, there will be sanctuaries (hotels, restaurants, bars, summer camps, vehicles) which people may visit to separate themselves from adhesion or other realities.” —C.R. Roberts, Vancouver-based technology reporter

“For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend, certain pundits can seriously propose that the wave of the future is chatting using electronic hand-puppets. Flight Simulator is not an aircraft, and typing at a screen is not an augmentation of the real world.” —Seth Finkelstein, author of the Infothought blog, writer and programmer

“A map is not the territory and a letter is not the person. We have always had multiple facades, for most, most common, work, home and play. The extension into more immersive ‘unreal’ worlds is going to happen.” —Hamish MacEwen, consultant at Open ICT in New Zealand

The evolution of user interfaces:   “There will be ‘subvocal’ inputs that detect ‘almost speech’ that you will, but do not actually voice.  Small sensors on teeth will also let you tap commands. Your eyeballs will track desires, sensed by your eyeglasses. And so on.” —David Brin, futurist and author of “The Transparent Society”

“WiFi- and WiMax-enabled badges with voice recognition will act as personal assistants—allowing you to talk with someone by saying their name, to post a voice blog, or access directions from the Internet for the task at hand.” —Jim Kohlenberger, director of Voice on the Net Coalition; senior fellow at the Benton Foundation

“I could see a whole physical way of communicating with our technology tools that could be part of our health and exercise. A day answering e-mails could be a full-on physical workout ; )….” —Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards

“We will see the display interface device separated from the input device over the next 12 years. Display devices will be everywhere, and you will be able to use them with your input device. The input device might be virtual, as in the case of the iPhone or a holographic keyboard, or they might resemble the keyboards and touchpads that people are using today.” —Ross Rader, a director with Tucows who is active in the ICANN Registrars constituency

“While air-typing and haptic gestures are widespread and ubiquitous, the arrival of embedded optical displays, thought-transcription, eye-movement tracking, and predictive-behavior modeling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction model.” —Sean Steele, CEO and senior security consultant for infoLock Technologies

The evolution of network architecture:   “The control-oriented telco (ITU) next-generation network will not fully evolve, the importance of openness and enabling innovation from the edges will prevail; i.e. Internet will essentially retain the key characteristics we enjoy today, mainly because there's more money to be made.” —Adam Peake, executive research fellow and telecommunications policy analyst at the Center for Global Communications

“Some parts of the Internet may fragment, as nations pursue their own technology trajectories. The Internet is so vastly complex, incremental upgrades seem to be the only way to get anything done…Places like China may make big leaps and bounds because there is less legacy.” —Anthony Townsend, research director, The Institute for the Future

“Current Internet standards bodies and core Internet protocols are ossifying to such an extent that security and performance requirements for next-generation applications will require a totally new base platform. If current Internet base protocols survive, it will be as a substrata paved over by new-generation smarter ways of connecting.” —Ian Peter, Ian Peter and Associates and the Internet Mark 2 Project

“The Web must still be a messy, fabulous, exciting, dangerous, poetic, depressing, elating place...akin to life; which is not a bad thing.” —Luis Santos, Universidade do Minho-Braga, Portugal

“When have we ever stopped crime? If it is a choice between having some criminals around and having a repressive government, I will take the former; they are much easier to deal with.” —Leonard Witt, associate professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and author of the Webog PJNet.org

“The Internet is not magical; it will be utterly over-managed by commercial concerns, hobbled with ‘security’ micromanagement, and turned into money-shaped traffic for business, the rest 90% paid-for content download and the rest of the bandwidth used for market feedback.”—Tom Jennings, University of California-Irvine, creator of FidoNet and builder of Wired magazine’s first online site

The evolution of work life and home life activity: “Corporate control of workers’ time—in the guise of work/ family balance—now extends to detailed monitoring of when people are on and off work. The company town is replaced by ‘company time-management,’ and it is work time that drives all other time uses. This dystopia challenges the concept of white-collar work, and unionism is increasingly an issue.”—Steve Sawyer, associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University

“The result may be longer, less-efficient working hours and more stressful home life.”—Victoria Nash, director of graduate studies and policy and research officer, the Oxford Internet Institute

“It’s already happened, for better or worse. Get over it.”—Anonymous respondent

(Many additional thoughtful and provocative comments appear in the main report.)