• More IPv6 deployment.

• Whack-a-mole with automated bots on social media. The war with spam email was a long one. This one may be too. My guess is that in the end, the bots will lose out, maybe via some kind of zero-knowledge proof of identity stuff.

• YouTube cracking down on ad-blocking.

• Continued rise of dark-mode interfaces.

• Either a general acceptance of least-common-denominator stuff (e.g. accepting that one can’t restrict what content is visible that might come from some other country) or an increasing number of countries mandating that their ISPs block stuff that they want blocked. If the blocking happens, probably an increase in use of software that seeks to evade such blocking.

I do wonder a bit what the impact will be from the shift we’ve seen from PCs being the primary way to access the Internet to mobile devices. Like, for example:

https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/touch-typing-learn-practice-gen-z-speed-rjhlvrb00

In 2000, 44% of American high school students had taken a keyboard skills course, but by 2019 this had fallen to 2.5%.

In the US, teachers say that they have often assumed that young people can type because they spend so long with their devices. But students say they often use tablet devices or their phones instead, making them proficient at scrolling and tapping, but less skilled at typing.

If the ability to touch-type goes into serious decline, the ability to enter text rapidly will as well, and I’d expect that to have various knock-on effects in UI; brevity of input text may become more important.

• Images and video becoming less proof-of-truth. We can synthesize pretty good photograph-looking images of things now. Probably going to get there with video, too. My bet is that the advantage is and will be on the side of synthesizing content, not of detecting that an image is synthesized. We might need to go back to the era before we had recording devices, when we relied upon specialized, trustworthy people putting their reputation on the line to attest to things. Maybe that, rather than photographs or video, will be what we see on Web pages to show that something is true.

Some things that I don’t expect to see:

• The rise of VR as the primary mechanism to navigate the Internet, a la the Metaverse in Snow Crash or the probably-named-after-it Metaverse that Facebook’s banged on. Various people have tried various implementations, and it hasn’t caught on. I am skeptical that it makes a lot of sense — working in 2D works pretty well for most things.

• Voice interaction becoming the primary mode of communication or computer control, not unless we get some sort of sensors and systems that can pick up subvocalization or something. You can’t control software near other people via voice without being obnoxious.