With the digital Web becoming the new unexplored frontier for citizens and lawmakers alike, questions are arising on the future of the Internet and what direction it will take. A new Pew Research Center report reveals that experts are mostly worried about government malfeasance.

Pew posed this and other questions to more than 2,500 experts it considers "technology builders and analysts":

"By 2025 will there be significant changes for the worse and hindrances to the ways in which people get and share content online compared with the way globally networked people can operate online today?"

Of the more than 1,400 who responded, 65 percent said "no," while the other 35 percent said "yes." Some said they wished they could choose both answers.

All of the experts were also asked to assess what they feared are the worst threats to the positive expansion of the Internet. They landed on four key points:

1) Actions by nation-states to maintain security and political control will lead to more blocking, filtering, segmentation and balkanization of the Internet.

2) Trust will evaporate in the wake of revelations about government and corporate surveillance and likely greater surveillance in the future.

3) Commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life.

4) Efforts to fix the TMI (too much information) problem might over-compensate and actually thwart content sharing.

That's right, folks: Most experts expect that as the Internet becomes more intertwined in our lives, it also opens itself up to all kinds of regulatory and financial pressures. The more money there is to be made on the Internet, the more likely it will be abused. The more information there is on the Internet, the more likely someone (read: government) will want to control that flow. After all, knowledge is power.

But those who were optimistic about the Internet's future argue that the expansion of the Internet should be able to mitigate any of the negatives. They say that because of the rise of mobile technology like increasingly affordable smartphones, billions more people may gain access to more information.

"Social norms will change to deal with potential harms in online social interactions," wrote Vint Cerf, a Google vice president and co-inventor of the Internet protocol. "The Internet will become far more accessible than it is today -- governments and corporations are finally figuring out how important adaptability is. AI [Artificial Intelligence] and natural language processing may well make the Internet far more useful than it is today."

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