On Freedom to Tinker, Timothy B Lee offers a list of 25 eminently plausible predictions for tech and policy for 2011. I don't often take predictions seriously, but if I were a gambling person, I'd give even odds on 80 percent of these bearing fruit:
1. DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly…
5. Some advertising networks and third-party Web services will begin to voluntarily respect the Do Not Track header, which will be supported by all the major browsers. However, sites will have varying interpretations of what the DNT header requires, leading to accusations that some purportedly DNT-respecting sites are not fully DNT-compliant…
9. 2011 will see the outbreak of the first massive botnet/malware that attacks smartphones, most likely iPhone or Android models running older software than the latest and greatest. If Android is the target, it will lead to aggressive finger-pointing, particularly given how many users are presently running Android software that's a year or more behind Google's latest–a trend that will continue in 2011.
10. Mainstream media outlets will continue building custom "apps" to present their content on mobile devices. They'll fall short of expectations and fail to reverse the decline of any magazines or newspapers…
18. Multiple Wikileaks alternatives will pop up, and pundits will start to realize that mass leaks are enabled by technology trends, not just by one freaky Australian dude…
20. Copyright claims will be asserted against players even further removed from underlying infringement than Internet/online Service Providers: domain name system participants, ad and payment networks, and upstream hosts. Some of these claims will win at the district court level, mostly on default judgments, but appeals will still be pending at year's end.
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(Image: Pink Floyd – Bliss, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from oddsock's photostream)
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