WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
As the number of connected devices proliferates the internet we knew and loved is going away, and being replaced by something else, but what should we call it?
It’s obvious when you think about it – the end of the Internet is drawing near – or at least the internet as we know it, and that’s according to someone who knows it better than almost everyone else on the planet. While speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last Thursday, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said the current internet will seem to vanish as it becomes a part of everyday objects and services.
“There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense [the internet],” Schmidt said, “it will be part of your presence all the time.”
Meanwhile Schmidt also went on to say that Google is positioning itself to become a major provider of the internet’s next iteration – on Earth and in space, and the company made headlines this week with another $1 billion investment in Elon Musk’s SpaceX communications project which aims to use 4,425 low Earth orbit satellites to connect every square inch of the planet.
Google’s also getting deeper into the wireless sector too – with ambitions to sell mobile phone plans directly to consumers as early as this year under it’s Project Fi banner, an MVNO service that piggybacks on top of Sprint and T-Mobiles wireless networks.
The assumptions made by the comment from Google’s Eric Schmidt “the internet will disappear” appear to me to be spot on.
With the advent of the “cloud” and connections between devices and services for example, the sense of an internet will in fact vanish.