Who knows. From what I have studied it seems unlikely that the Internet will get a complete overhaul, but there are certain pressing issues that need to be addressed, such as security, and so I predict that, within a few decades, the Internet will be very different from the one that we use today.
From the papers we discussed in our networking class it seems as though the trend of architecture research is focusing on data-centric approaches (although there are some radical application-centric ideas floating around). This is based on the idea that the current trend of internet use is to find data.
People don't care about where the data comes from, they just care that they get the data. Although I agree that this might be useful right now, it suffers from the same problems that plagued the original creation of the internet. The original designers were focused solely on what they needed for an internet right then and there. They didn't look forward to the future to try and incorporate ideas for a more data-centric network. If we follow suit and do not look a little ahead to the future, we may be implementing a data-centric network when the trend is shifting away from that type of network.
However, I do understand that researchers need to work with what they have and that it is incredibly difficult to predict the future. After all, who knew that the internet would grow to permeate the entire world?
I don't have any solutions to the current problems of the internet and at first I felt that the internet is extremely useful for everything I need, so why fix what isn't broke? Studying internet architecture has opened my eyes to the real struggles behind security issues and, from some radical papers, I have come to understand how limiting the internet architecture can be at times. I wasn't looking at the big picture of the internet before and now I better understand what people are trying to do and what kind of areas I need to look into if I want to help brainstorm the future of the internet.
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