25 plausible tech/policy predictions for 2011

Cory Doctorow quotes Freedom to Tinker’s Timothy B Lee on his list of 25 plausible predictions for tech and policy for 2011:

25 plausible tech/policy predictions for 2011

“1. DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement.
2. Copyright and patent issues will continue to be stalemated in Congress.
3. Momentum will grow for HTTPS by default.
4. Despite substantial attention by Congress to online privacy, the FTC won’t be granted authority to mandate Do Not Track compliance.
5. Some advertising networks and third-party Web services will begin to voluntarily respect the Do Not Track header.
6. Congress will pass an electronic privacy bill.
7. The seemingly N^2 patent lawsuits among all the major smartphone players will be resolved through a grand cross-licensing bargain.
8. Android smartphones will continue gaining market share, mostly at the expense of BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones.
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.
10. Mainstream media outlets will continue building custom “apps” … and fail to reverse the decline of any magazines or newspapers.
11. At year’s end, the district court will still not have issued a final judgment on the Google Book Search settlement.
12. The market for Internet set-top boxes like Google TV and Apple TV will continue to be chaotic throughout 2011.
13. Online sellers with device-specific consumer stores will come under antitrust scrutiny, and perhaps even be dragged into court.
14. With electronic voting machines beginning to wear out but budgets tight, there will be much heated discussion of electronic voting, including antitrust concern over the e-voting technology vendors.
15. Pressure will continue to mount on election authorities to make it easier for overseas and military voters to cast votes remotely.
16. In contrast, where domestic absentee voters are permitted to use remote voting systems voters will do so in large numbers, increasing the pressure to make remote voting easier for domestic voters.
17. At least one candidate for the Republican presidential nomination will express concern about the security of electronic voting machines.
18. Multiple Wikileaks alternatives will pop up.
19. The RIAA and/or MPAA will be sued over their role in the government’s actions to reassign DNS names owned by allegedly unlawful web sites.
20. Copyright claims will be asserted against players even further removed from underlying infringement than Internet/online Service Providers.
21. A distributed naming system for Web/broadcast content will gain substantial mindshare and measurable US usage after the trifecta of attacks on Wikileaks DNS, COICA, and further attacks on privacy-preserving or anonymous registration in the ICANN-sponsored DNS.
22. ICANN still will not have introduced new generic TLDs.
23. The FCC’s recently-announced network neutrality rules will continue to attract criticism from both ends of the political spectrum.
24. The tech policy world will continue debating the Comcast/Level 3 dispute, but the FCC won’t take any meaningful actions to help Level 3 or punish Comcast.
25. Comcast and other cable companies will treat the Comcast/Level 3 dispute as a template for future negotiations, demanding payments to terminate streaming video content.”

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I agree that there’s a good chance that many of these will occur in 2011.

Stephen