Pew Research conducted a study with interviews to learn what the experts think about new and emerging threats to the Internet. It turns out that Internet freedoms are most at risk and top VPN ExpressVPN shares the top threats to online liberty.
Four Top Internet Threats Relate to Internet Freedom
Pew Research summed up the results of their 1,400 person study and found four main threats. They also found that all of these threats relate in some way to online freedom.
First, most of the respondents found that accessing and sharing content will get more difficult in the future. Most hope that they and others can together find ways to prevent hindrances to online content sharing. But they all see the trend pointing to ease of sharing but several reasons why people will have to be a lot more careful about it.
This brings us to the second threat, Internet censorship. They pointed out that governments will become more active in attempting to secure their countries through online surveillance, website blocking and Internet filtering. This will be popular because it also helps them gain and maintain political control.
Third, these experts fear that consumer trust will wane considerably. Most of this is because of the above government actions. Corporations who engage in surveillance are included here. The flow of information will thus be greatly affected. Sharing behaviors will change. And Internet architecture will also be changed, affecting this and other online behaviors. Finally, content sharing will also be affected by the TMI problem.
Internet regulation sums up the biggest threats to the Internet today. And the ones responsible are ironically the ones who claim that they are protecting us. Government control of the Internet is a very real threat. But we all hope that technology will grow to help us find ways to prevent our Internet liberties from being quashed. The experts all expect that the open nature of the Internet will be preserves despite the challenges.