【正文】 ol and the Internet’s architecture.Crossing the LineIf Mr. Cerf and about two dozen other pundits Red Herring interviewed about the future of the Internet are right, in 10 years’ time the barriers between our bodies and the Internet will blur as will those between the real world and virtual reality.Red Herring Automakers, for instance, might conceivably post their parts catalogs in the virtual world of Second Life, a pixilated 3D online blend of MySpace, eBay, and renaissance fair crossed with a Star Trek convention. Second Life participants—who own the rights to whatever intellectual property they create online—will make money both by using the catalog to design their own cars in cyberspace and by selling their online designs back to the manufacturers, says Danish economist and tech entrepreneur Nikolaj Nyholm.eBaySecond Life Today’s devices will disappear. Electronics will instead be embedded in our environment, woven into our clothing, and written directly to our retinas from eyeglasses and contact lenses, predicts inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil. “Devices will no longer be spokes on the Internet—they will be the nodes themselves,” he says.We will know exactly when our children will be dropped off because the school bus will be connected to the Internet, says Internet doyenne Esther Dyson. Our cars might one day arrange for repairs at dealerships before we realize there’s a problem.Everything from the family fridge to the office coffee pot—as well as heating, cooling, and security systems—will be managed through the Internet, possibly using soupedup mobile phones doubling as universal remote controls, says Google’s Mr. Cerf. By 2016, he predicts the online population of 1 billion will treble, and a huge portion will be mobile. And by then, the Internet will bee so pervasive that connecting to it will no longer be a conscious act.Bandwidth access of 100 megabits per second or more will bee the norm. “It is probably a safe bet that everyone will be able to have a fullmotion, highdefinition realtime link to anyone,” says Bram Cohen, creator of the popular peertopeer program BitTorrent. Once that happens, “the concept of who is online and who is offline will melt away,” says Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo’s director of media and desktop search.Taken for GrantedIn sum, the Internet “will just bee like plumbing, which you won’t notice unless it backs up,” says Brewster Kahle, inventor of the Wide Area Information Server, the Internet’s first publishing system, and cofounder of the Internet Archive, the largest publicly accessible, privately funded digital archive in the world.While the technical underpinnings of the Internet are likely to undergo drastic change, the nature of those changes will be wrought by policy decisions made by governments with a heightened interest in overseeing the Internet. When a network is this critical to just about everything, it’s reasonable to expect that governments will seek tighter control of what remains today a decentralized and somewhat anarchic system. The trick will be to preserve the creativity that spawns innovation—and profit—in this more vital and inevitably more regulated Internet.No matter what, people will continue to make money from Internet innovation in a variety of ways.Targeted advertising will continue to be an important revenue generator, as will intellectual property distribution, predicts Mr. Cerf. Tools for content production will evolve to allow for widespread and uniform tagging of content, significantly improving our ability to use sensor data, financial information, medical data, text, imagery, video, and audio. And the semantic web being promoted by World Wide Web inventor Tim BernersLee will help us better match puter understanding with human understanding of the world around us, though it will likely be far from perfect.People will be able to talk to the Internet when searching for information or interacting with various devices—and it will respond, though not necessarily in English, which will cease to be the dominant language on the web, says John Patrick, a founding member of the World Wide Web consortium and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM.IBM As socalled sensor networks evolve, there will be vastly more machines than people online. As it is, there are almost 10 billion embedded microcontrollers shipped every year. “This is the next networking frontier—following inexorably down from desktops, laptops, and palmtops, including cell phones,” says Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. This is what will make up much of the machinetomachine traffic, he says.3Com Services, Services, ServicesRFID tags will be in wider use. So will geolocation services, which can be used to locate friends, places, and events of interest. Better realtime language translations will be available, at least for text translations.Mashups won’t be limited to web sites—we’ll see the introduction of “mashed” realtime web applications. The Internet will further revolutionize publishing, film, and television. “You will suddenly have a few hundred thousand producers out to kill each other, peting on the Internet,” predicts Charles Zhang, founder and CEO of Beijingbased portal . “You will have instant rankings of the most popular videos,” adds Mr. Zhang, who reckons China will lead the way in this new form.Independent management consultant and author John Hagel III sees opportunities in network infrastructure management and customer relationship businesses that put together individualized bundles of products and services and act as trusted advisors.Search will remain big. Big players will continue to dominate online, says Paul Saffo, director of the Palo Alto, Californiabased Institute of the Future. “The lesson is, if you want to bee big you do so by empowering and enabling lots and lots of small players.” The same way that Google, Ama