It's not often many of us stop to consider where information technology will be in 5 to 10 years time. I've decided to dedicate a post to this very subject, as some of the possibilities are truly worrying.



As I write to you, the main English service provider, BT, is under pressure to block The Pirate Bay from any access on their service. The site as we all know is infamous for having vast quantities of pirated and stolen information content, from movies to documents. This is something we could see happening on a much larger scale in the future, in a bid to stop all illegal content flow on the web.



If you have a couple of minutes, watch this rather interesting clip on a proposition by the entertainment king-pins.









See what I mean? I'm by no means saying that pirating content is right. Of course, it is not. My lecturer recently suggested: What if in 10 years time the internet is closer to your premium TV subscription? It's plausible to believe service providers will sell 'packages' with access to certain sites only in a bid to prevent piracy. It all depends on how much pressure the fat cats want to apply. We could be on our way to a very dark era of information communication indeed.



The internet is one of the final places on earth which facilitates for free speech and freedom itself. We cannot afford to let it fall under control to an entity, or we lose our own online privacy as well as freedom. If you have no privacy how can you ever be free?



You may recall an earlier post of mine stating that piracy was the cancer killing the music industry. It may well kill online freedom as a whole if we let bills like PROTECT-IP pass.



Eager to hear your thoughts on this.