It never ceases to surprise me when people start touting this kind of un-reality. What world are they living in? What did broadband look like 5 years ago? I could download at 2MB, now at 6MB. And that 6MB is because I specifically chose my location for distance from the exchange. Yet in another 5 it'll be 100MB? My exchange already has problems providing me 6MB at peak evening time (ends up more like 3MB).

What a joke.

It may be true for certain areas of high density cities but not anywhere else in the west. (Note: East, Singapore etc seem to have fast fibre already at very fast speeds).

Even if gov or companies where willing to pay at this point after a recession, infrastructure takes tike to rollout.

1. Social influence becomes monetized even more and companies start identifying key brand advocates and compensating them
2. Businesses begin being 100% on the cloud
3. Online advertising shifts into affiliate advertising
4. Social media consulting has certification programs (modeled after microsoft and cisco, but with marketing emphasis of course)
5. Trust, transparency, and tactics used to emphasize these to your target audience will still be key, but companies will try to shift into a Zappos type culture if they want to remain competitive and if they have a similar business model as them (hence online retail)

These are just a few of my ideas, hope you enjoy. Follow me @JustinRFrench if you'd like thanks.

Justin

And i think Chinese letters would probably be very hard to put on a keyboard and also it would be really hard for them to code web-pages in Chinese instead of English HTML

But Chinese language will become more and more important in the future.

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Thanks for your attention.

There's not even one language of "Chinese". Mandarin anyone?

Actually, there is one written Chinese language. The various incompatible dialects are all spoken languages but they are written the same.

With all the comments about how China's internet is heavily restricted (and therefore the idea of the web being Chinese-language dominant in five years is impossible)...guys, Chinese language does not only exist in China.

I put up a post on my blog (and on open salon) with some links back to this post. You can see the post in question here:

http://www.faunacorporation.com/?p=49

I just thought I'd let you know about that. Thanks again for bringing this interview to our attention, and keep up the great work on ReadWriteWeb.

~s.

"All of these distinctions will completely go away," he said. "We're not trying to design the future. We're trying to invent it along the way ... This is about inventing the future, and we score ourselves based on whether our customers like it."

It looks like a lot of Americans are afraid of Chinese dominance. Thank god bush is no more in power otherwise there would have been a preemptive nuke strike.

When will the Americans wake up to realize that there is a world outside their border. Anyhow don't worry guys! Semantic web will have better translators for Mandarin to English.

I am not Chinese though.

If you stop and think about it, thats what all knowledge is, if its not generated by the users then who wrote it? The big blue fairy in the sky?

As for the web being video we already see massive amounts of web experiences based on humans playing games competatively and cooperatively, both high quality shoot-em ups and things like internet poker. Its already a highly visual medium, using pictures and immersive environments. Whats do you use internet for, "face" book, msn, skype....and reading articles and responding in proportion.

If the internet is dumbing down, there was always gossip over the washing lines out the back of terrace houses up and down cities everywhere. Most people don't give a monkey's about who provides the service or what is nature is, they just want to use it....to express whatever they are interested in. Thats it really...

I imagine the internet will look 3d and immersive, highly social. Infact pretty much as it looks now. Except it will be on little mobile phone screens and pocket projectors.

Gimme a break.

If anyone's got a more creative and informed crystal ball view, how bout we use this thread to start guessing closer, better than Schmidt does.

How bout I start off:

1. embedded tech (I'm talking in people not stuff)
2. augmented reality (in (across?) every digital interface)
3. next gen maxfi (where did all the visible pipes go?...)

Thom Kennon
(not a futurist, just paying a little more attention to things other than an iffy bottom line of a business with still a single hero rev model... ;> )

Quality analysis is the name of the game. Humans can do it. Robots can't do it. Artificial intelligence (AI) can't do it. Search engines can't do it.

Human brains do it.

Step 1. Who's the subject? What's the subject? When's it happening? Where's it happening? How's it happening? Why are you reading about it?

Who, what, when, where, how, and why.
AKA, Facet analysis.

Step 2.
a) If the results are for a search engine, rank it based on relevance to the initial search
b) If the results are for an index, write it elegantly and succinctly with appropriate headings so that the searcher will find it quickly.

Easier said than done. That's the beauty of the human brain.

The last time any of us appreciated a well-written index or a search result that worked the way we wanted it to, I bet a human who knew what they were doing was involved.

Addenda:
@Paul, "Filtering and sorting will probably be as important as search because some of the best discoveries in life are usually the result of something you are not searching for." -- Another boon to indexes are the serendipitous finds, much like what we used to experience in libraries and on bookshelves.

@Tim Bull, "you need to know what their interests are" so the ranking and cross-referencing will be helpful. This is a service industry, no doubt about it.

Here's why, Chinese has CHARACTERS....LOTS and LOTS of characters. Do you see a keyboard that's BIG enough to handle that many characters? NO.

Chinese is TOO hard to WRITE in the first place, with or without a computer.

Look at Japan and Japanese...they have created an ENGLISH equivalent using ROMAN characters called "romaji".

All programming is done in ENGLISH..all computer languages, from programming down to the machine language is done in ENGLISH CHARACTERS.

All NUMBERS and money is written in ENGLISH.

While I agree with your prognosis that the mainstream use of the media itself as the one stop place for your information. The internet is far, far from the basics. Wether you wish to acknowledge it or not. Even the internet is not without it's biases and agendas. This is only getting more so as fact. As you notice many sites imposing more strict rules and regulations on what you can or cannot say on a social, political, and cultural level.

Where as in the 'basics' that you mentioned. Coffee shops, town halls, back yard barbeques, etc do not have. This is an unseen danger that comes with the territory. However, as a whole, taking it in one glance, there are plenty of venues for almost anyone of any stance to have. Yet, plenty of these have been secluded off to their own areas.

One could argue that it's just simply culture, trend, and conformonism that determine what is 'normal' and what isn't in regards to sources of knowledge. But, in retrospect, just like with the media, the internet is slowly but surely being controlled by it's advertisers. Each entity having more and more control being imposed on its freedom based on what their advertisers agree to.

There really is not escape from this type of bias and control, unless you go back to just the simple basics. As with anything, I suppose, you just have to take the good with the bad. But, each site holder, does have a responsibility to pick and chose their advertising carefully, as time goes on, this will be of even more crucial importance. Because, sites could not handle hoards of advertisers pulling from them. Again, this isn't a huge problem yet. But, there is escalation arising and turning a blind eye, while being overly optomistic of the freedomes the world wide web offer can have dangerous outcomes.

It's not just China. Look at much of Asia, we have large Chinese population in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.

Malaysia is a good example. The Chinese population is 30% and most are educated in Chinese.

Traditional since when? There was an earlier time when the media had very little sway. Discussions and decisions were made in coffee shops and town halls. A reduction in media influence is to be commended as a return to the basics.

2. Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
-Those that are teenagers in five years will dominate the internet with increasing presence. the age of the internet user will become increasingly younger. Think of it as teenagers using a telephone only the telephone is free.

3. Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today
-Nothing earth shaking here.

4. Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
-Nothing earth shaking here, either.

5. "We're starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.
-Content has been moving steadily to video since the invention of television. I am beginning to feel that this speech was aimed at an audience of people completely ignorant of the internet's existence.

6. "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
-It actually is more important in Financial Markets. why would he present something this obvious in the form of an apology vis-a/vis any other type of information.

7. There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
- Again, finacial markets, among others have been doing real time since before the introduction of windows. Again, who is this guy talking to?

8. It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

-User generated information doesn't bother me any more than /information generated by other sources. News organizations, for instance always had an attitude that they knew more than the general public, because they got inside information. It has been my experience that people do not speak off the record to journalists unless it suits their agenda. the internet will become, as it already has, a combination of legitimate information an the stuff you see on the check out line or on the Nightly News.
-As far as how to rank information, their will be user generated rankings on a general public level and another level ranked through collecting data on Virtual individual Networks which are now spring up all over the Net.
-What are Virtual Individual Networks? They are what I am working on right now.

They will be replaced by a more inclusive media that integrates search, traditional print, radio and television. This is happening now with the merging of print and television stations (see San Diego and Hawaii news for this).

These new entities will be stronger and more profitable as they will take the local advertising market and revenue away from search.

Danny
PrintFreeMaps.com

This isn't far fetched. Just today ICANN is approving the use of domain names in all character formats. Folks, look at it this way. The internet is for the most part, user generated content. Last I checked China had more "users" than any other technological society. It is only that now, in this present age, our abilities in regards to technology's capacity, in the western world are higher. But, as China's technology continues to grow and as more and more PC's are placed into the homes there. It's only logical to come to a conclusion that we would see more content being created and available from that venue.

This fact alone is not really a 'dramatic' change. The internet is not going to adopt some 'one world language' as some alude to.

The most important change we may face that was not really covered in this article is Government intervention and regulation of the internet. This is unfortunatley, an almost inevitable conclusion. I suspect the reason the internet is not currently heavily regulated is because we may be waiting for other nations to 'catch up' in terms of the culture in the technology. Once some of these other nations get to where we are at. Their world leaders will not stand for the amount of free speech use that this wonderful world wide web is used for. After other nations have taken action, it's then likely that the west will follow with its own form of regulation.

Sure they speak English. But do they understand it? Chinese is a language based on symbols. A knowledegable person knows 400 symbols. A really educated, wise person knows about 2000.

China is also getting get real fast. It will be rich when old. Old empires can only go in one direction - DOWN.

I have been around long enough to have written the real time operating systems on gigundo mainframes and experience has taught me that if you dwell on what you did yesterday (OK five minutes ago) you lose. Obviously Mr. Schmidt has a vested interest in pumping up his properties (ranking, YouTube) but he is probably as right as you can be when judging the unpredictable future.

And if you don't listen to your colleages and family who are younger, you're just dumb. They not only are the future, but have had the opportunity to be immersed in the future that became the present. Their distain for anything smelling like authority that Eric laughed about is probably good overall because it stops some less talented managers from forcing them into moulds that no longer attract or sell.

The Chinese (and I would add Indian) content flood seems plausible -- I am now communicating with a young colleague in Shanghai who bought the rights to some of the equipment I developed and find him to be somewhat more respectful to what I am used to and very quick to learn. It is interesting what can happen when you combine the quick mind with the honest desire to find out how and why something was done. So, since that genre exists in the burgeoning China, I would expect them to be a dominating force.

Asians is a broad term, it includes Indians, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, etc... and the differences between these languages is astounding, in fact Tagalog(Filipino) has many Spanish words mixed in due to the fact that it was a colony of Spain for so long.

Japanese has verbs.
Chinese has verbs.
Tagalog has verbs.

The languages may be very different but I guarantee that is something that all have in common

Without verbs they're stuck in a world of trivia, where everything is a noun, unable to enter the world of concepts. It's an unworkable situation. They're paralyzed until they learn English. Concepts are how the world functions. Yes, in grade school trivia is important.

Before you start shooting me down in flames for being picky, ask yourself one simple question: if a plumber didn't know what a pipe was, would you give him the job? Writers and Journalists, more than anyone in our society, should know how correctly to use the tools of their trade: words.

The Chinese internet is VERY heavily filtered. Most of the top sites most people in the world access every day like Facebook, Twitter and even GMail are partially or completing blocked out. Censorship and isolationism is is going to continue to be an absolute barrier to Chinese content becoming mainstream. Add to this that there is a huge stylistic difference between Chinese and other countries web sites. Most Western people would find Chinese web sites to be garish and visually overwhelming.

I'm with hj. Chinese language material will NOT dominate the Net anytime soon. It will become >>A

Translation tools will, over time, make language differences increasinly irrelevant.

Much depends upon the global economy, the stability of which is by no means assured. And upon whom the winners and losers are in the economic games. Regardless, English will not soon cease to be the most universally spoken of Earth's languages.

http://yebol.com

Revolution be it physical or mental will always reside with the youth. China, Africa, Indo-China, and others will have their moment on the world stage as a leader, if it will be in 5 years is a gamble.

User generated content is the key to greater communication, better political alliances, business endeavors, educational programs and possibly world stability.

Is no one tired of business as usual?

One thing is certain, translation software is on the rise, mobile phone makers are gearing up to sell millions of internet high speed devices that will do multiple applications, and governments all over the globe are investing in infrastructure.

Moore's law states the capacity doubles every year, so it not a factor of 10, it's a factor of 2*2*2*2*2 = 32
.

This is like one of those predictions in the 1980's where people were saying everyone is going to speak Japanese when doing business because they are going to take over. The Japanese have since then been mired in twenty years of economic morass.

"Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly."

I don't even know what that means. Does anyone actually know what that means, and if you do know what that means does it even matter that kids can use the twitter and facebook apps?

"Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today."

Woooow. Thanks Dr. Statistics!! Do you have anything else to say, like "with the population growing we are going to need to generate more electricity within 5 years to keep the lights on"?

"Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away."

That is true. This plays into the whole user-generated thing. Users generating content aren't looking for lots of revenue streams. Gigantic media companies are. How do you control piracy in a seamlessly digital world where people are placing less and less value on content generated by a smaller and smaller group of wealthy and disconnected elites? Oh shit, how are a different but intrinsically similar group of smaller and smaller wealthy elites going to provide access and "rank" to user generated content? LOL GOOGLE, I am looking at you.

"We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video"

They just admitted a few weeks ago they paid way to much for youtube. He has to say this for his shareholders who are going to be left holding the bag on youtube.com

"Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."

Real time search is the new twitter, which was the new youtube, which was the new ___. No one knows if it is a fad or not yet.

"There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time. We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"

I ask: who gives a shit? By ranking it you are controlling it. If you are controlling it then you are monetizing it. Stop trying to extract money out of every porous surface. What are you going to do anyway? -make a textvertisement saying: '28% percent of your friends have purchased Crest toothpaste in the last month, what are you waiting for!' If that is the future then please just shoot me now.

"It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem."

Unbelievable! Human beings used to be able to communicate with one another without someone sticking out his hand and trying to make money off of it. Is nothing sacred anymore? Furthermore, Eric Schmidt wants you to know that The #1 "challenge for the age" is ranking real time searches. Not exploring space, not solving global warming, not building sustainable communities, not solving world peace, world hunger, eliminating poverty, hell even curing cancer. No sir! It's ranking and monetizing your life's communications to sell to someone else.

Um... no.

The video reminds of the World Fair ads from the early 20th century that predicted things such as personal robots, self-driving cars, personal helicopters, tube-roads, etc....all by 1970.

Jeff Brandt
www.comsi.com

On the bandwidth side, I was at Calit2 behind some serious bandwidth for a demo of the "Global Optiputer" pushing up to 50Gigs. This is true HD in real-time.

http://www.youtube.com/timreha#p/a/E06F7EE15A7EFEEC/2/6P-Tk9SuTCo

I think that Schmidt needs to add that we will have consumer grade "Star Caves", real-time "Holodecks" in the home and mini-starcaves on your desk or equivalent glasses. Here is a video, super crazy futuristic tech that is here today in the labs.

http://www.youtube.com/timreha#p/a/E06F7EE15A7EFEEC/1/5JrEk8UldJg

Go to www.futureinreview.com to see some photos of this stuff.

Sure, but one must make a distinction: there are users and power users. Experts and non-experts. Amateurs and professionals. Pea-brains and jupiter-brains. Compare the average guy's skills to the best in history. They're less than zero.

I meant 2^(60/18) = 10.07 times. Sorry.

>> Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law,

>It's actually 32. Factor of 32. It's not 5x2 rather it is 2^5.

I guess you are making your calculation based on computers doubling its capacity (or speed, whatever) every year. My guess is that Eric Schmidt was thinking about doubling it every 18 months. This way you would have: 2^(60/18) = 10,07 years.

According to Wikipedia:
Although originally calculated as a doubling every year, Moore later refined the period to two years. It is often incorrectly quoted as a doubling of transistors every 18 months, as David House, an Intel Executive, gave that period to chip performance increase. The actual period was about 20 months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#cite_note-0

Largest? Perhaps. Most respected? I don't think so. Everyone knows that Gartner's analysis supports whoever is paying for it.

Oh, they do have one innovation. Websites to download copyrighted music and movies.

It's actually 32. Factor of 32. It's not 5x2 rather it is 2^5.

Ted

I agree that there's a lot of really dumb stuff out there. A quick perusal of any comment thread or YouTube will show you that. But user generated content will not contribute to people being dumber, just more exposed to dumb things if they choose to follow them. On the flip side, there is ample opportunity to find with relative ease extremely smart user generated content that is better than the mere set of encyclopedias I grew up with. So far, so good concerning user generate content. The challenge is just as Eric Schmidt stated: How do you rank this stuff. There will come a way. Remember that in the beginning of search there really were no terrific good browsers serving up extremely relevant results. Google, changed that. I think that in a way, they can use the same or similar model on social media and user generated content.

LOL, I think that's more of a hope that a prediction..

What WILL happen though, is that people that can read/speak Chinese will have access to more content than those that don't. That will put these Chinese readers at a great advantage, since among those that currently use the internet are probably the most educated, and therefore the most likely to know English, they will have access to a much greater part of the internet (provided it's not 100% filtered out for them).

FFS.

New gurus will replace old ones. Google is only one of them, but for the moment the most efficient for search on the web.
Nobody knows what will happen with climate changes. Asia is particularly threatened by natural disasters.
Badly intentioned people will be able to fake on social networks and they would "make" our opinion.
In such an information flow, we will need to set limits and to find a way to control legality without hurting personal liberty.

Karin

I lecture students from some of China's leading universities and while this is a generalisation, they adopt and mash up, and their general knowledge about the West and tech is not reciprocated the other way. Reasons of course; again this is a perception.

Here I'm giving an undergrad class a task after a forty minute accelerated lecture. What is the future of the web?

Regarding broadband speeds, although the word has already been appropriated, the concept of Outernet - the net on everywhere - has been a constant theme for me, written up on Apple Pofiles.

Most likely our ambitions will run alongside these new variables, but I'd imagine there's some furious modeliing and trend extrapolation going on.

Was it John McHale that said: "The future of the past is in the future. The future of the present is in the past. The future of the future is the present".

Should that read the future ic Chinese?

Nice post, Marshal.

Most everything will be served from a cloud so you will be able to access your ebook, audio book, recipe, movie, file from any device that is connected to the internet.

Social networks will feed channels of content to you and you will feed what you are interested in to those who are connected with you.

Without a doubt though, your hub will be your own website/gateway/portal where your channels of communication will originate and terminate.

In 5 years, the web will be about controlling your own brand and your own experience. Advertising will evolve to more of a discovery through relationship model than pitch and push.

Semantics and Structured Data will begin reward those who are willing to play by the rules to be found much easier that those who do not.

Filtering and sorting will probably be as important as search because some of the best discoveries in life are usually the result of something you are not searching for.

Discovery engines will evolve to help people tap into a need by relating experiences with related products, services and events. (Just finishing a great Hemingway novel might make you a great prospect for a fly fishing trip to Spain, a night out on the town at a local tavern or a desire to watch For Whom The Bell Tolls with Gary Cooper.)

Great article! I am looking forward to the full 45 minute interview.

If China dominates the web and remains a dictatorship we have lost the war of ideas.

Cisco and Google help Chinese police round up dissidents. Will they use their expertise on the rest of us.

I agree with Tom on this. In fact all Schmidt is doing is paraphrasing what he worries about. What about:

- identity management
- (your) content management
- security management
- information management
- 'we didn't see that coming' management

Someone will break through with something in at least one of those.

Google have made a big mess in China already, so I'd take Schmidt's words with a large pinch of salt. They've basically failed due to an ignorance of the culture there, and so you shouldn't take any predictions they make seriously.

Chinese will form a significant part of the web material, but it won't be read much outside of the borders.

The history of never having freedom of speech/press in the country means that the rest of us won't be missing much.

I say watch your TV's, DVD's, home security, and even your fridge. Appliances are starting to connect now, and
sooner or later people are going to expect TV's to do the things are computers do online. But this all leads to what I have been mistakenly forecasting for years...voice activated everything. Computer...TV On!

"...the great challenge of the age... It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that is the great challenge of the age."

Indexing real-time user generated information and distributing said info around the globe almost instantly to those that want to listen to it, when they want to listen to it, where they want to listen to it and how they want to listen to it (and without charging for it)... hmmm... that's a tough one.

Someone will figure it out! I just hope it's not the loudest voice that wins. I hope it's some kid from the middle of nowhere.

China already has the pipes...the U.S. is lagging behind in speed...didn't anyone here watch the Olympics...as far as consumer day to day use of the net...the U.S. is kind of behind...

Please w/ this dumb China is going to take over everything. China is only interested in China. It's a bunch of crap and people have been telling me this for YEARS. Shut up.

This doesn't mean that we're going to have to learn Mandarin to use the Web. It just means that the number of Chinese websites will eventually outnumber the number of English websites - that alone will make Chinese the dominant language of the Internet. The Chinese aren't going to use English on their websites, because most of their people can't speak English and many of those who can speak it can't actually read and write English well enough to use it.

It doesn't matter that the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content. We don't use the "whole" internet. We only use what directly appeals to our culture, language, and sensibilities which is a tiny sliver of a fraction of available content. More Chinese content does not mean less english content, any more than more chinese people means fewer Americans.

This isn't going to directly impact the typical American web surfer. This is a larger concern for Google because they cannot avoid dealing with the growing Chinese content and remain a relevant international force in searches.

These are "ruler" based predictions, you take a trend and you straight-line it out. Projecting the present into the future is never a good idea.

I agree, already we are seeing this shift inside organisations as well as on the internet as a whole. The move to Enterprise 2.0.

We are just beginning to work on this problem at http://binaryplex.com for Enterprise content which is a slightly different problem field - Enterprises have a lot better internal reputation and trust mechanisms for a start; I can usually work out who said something in a reliable way which is a first step to measuring their reputation.

The scale of this problem on the internet is huge - before you get to reputation, you need to know what their interests are (@ChrisSaad could be right, it's the dawning of APML!) but also reliable identity, real-time and other factors to measure reputation and opinion. It will take a combination of efforts and someone like a Google with their resources to make a major dent in this for the broader internet.

Thanks for the summary - a very interesting 6 minutes.

Even large online game companys use separate servers just for china - because of sensorship issues.

Eve online for example has one worldwide server for everyone in the world in which thousands of players all play the same game. but they had to create a separate server *cut off from the world* which requires a chinese citizen ID number to play.

How many people play on the world wide server? 40,000 to 50,000 peak. The chinese one? 3,000.

Most of google searches that offend chinese sensor's tastes are blocked, and even movies are heavily edited.

In short: how can they dominate the web when they can't even access a large majority of it?

Meanwhile English content will continue to be produced and consumed not only by the native English speaking audiences but also by International audiences, particularly the cultural and technical elites. The quality of content in English will continue to far surpass that of content in Chinese.

I was expecting better insight from the man who leads Google.

It will be interesting to see exactly how much the chinese language will dominate the web.
Considering that the chinese speaking people up greater than 1/6th of the global population, it's just a matter of time before that reflects in the content of web production.

Just based on that alone, I think translation and cross compatibility platforms and services will become much more important than they currently are.

Also,
As for indexing and ranking content, that's an intriguing question. Considering that "time" is part of the most ranking algorythms (in one way or another), the processes may need to shift to other factors completely.

Things that come to mind might be origins of the content, reputation of the originator, and permeation (repeats) and of the content.

APML's time is almost here :)

Let your personal network (and their personal network) rank it in a bottom-up manner:

http://iss.im

I was referring to this quote: "Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away."

Won't content just be targeted towards certain regional and language based audiences as it is currently?

I'm also not 100% sure that people will listen to 'other people' more than traditional news sources either, that is unless they manage to address the ranking of real-time data issue. How do you know who to trust? At least when you read something off the BBC website you assume it has some degree of legitimacy, and more importantly accountability if they have it all wrong.

Doesn't this require significant infrastructure build-out (fiber-optic I assume) and who is building such a network in the US?

I would think building such network in the US alone would take more than 5 years and many billions of investment. For all I know such networks are well underway in Europe, Japan, S. Korea, etc.

User Generated Content is going to be the collective dumbing down of our entire population.