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The Mobile Web: there's no rule saying it must survive

Media pundit Martin Warner has signalled the advent of "Web 3.0,"  saying "a step change is occurring." No, he's not talking about mobile Internet; he's going on about "the battleground for how content will be viewed over the web in the future."

His prediction is that issues such as privacy, piracy and personal security will require inter-governmental business and consumer interest groups "to join forces to ensure there are measured policies that can 'lightly' govern the web." Why light policies?

Because the web’s strength is all about its openness, liberal attitudes, and collaborative nature, and will rely even more on its ability to become even more connected, with users file sharing more in social patterns.

Warner wrote this in the blog he's using to publicise next month's Technology Of Tomorrow conference in London - a conf that can only be described as "star-studded" with names from Sir Richard Branson through Carly Fiorina and on to Woz himself due to appear in the Albert Hall September 30th. But he does seem to be making an assumption which too many in mobile also seem to be making: that some Higher Power actually cares about the survival of the Internet, or the emergence of a viable mobile Internet.

Warner understands that the financial future of the Net is in question: 

The question that we believe needs to be answered is whether social-based websites, like social networking, provide the type of growth opportunity for Web 3.0, particularly as all these businesses (MySpace, Hi5, Facebook, Bebo, Ning, etc) have underpinning business models that rely on online ad-sales revenue. Other key web markets are also affected by online ad-sales including search, video, publications, e-commerce, retail and many more.

What if online ad-sales were to decline dramatically over the next year or two... what would happen to these businesses?

Good question, but hardly speculative!

Advertising always declines in a depressed economy, and no amount of whistling in the dark can postpone the coming troubled years; the ad-driven Internet will suffer.

What may be more fruitful as speculative material would be this: "Why would the world's Governments welcome "openness, liberal attitudes, and collaborative nature" - the things Warner lists as "strengths of the Internet?" How would China gain from an open, liberal Internet? What does Iran expect to harvest from collaborative Internet links? How does the corporate US empire of digital rights management score from openness?

And with countries like Russia hosting some of the most dangerous cracker-programming businesses on the Web, how do the rest of us gain from "light management"?