As 2025 begins, I thought I’d climb up into the crow’s nest and share what I am paying attention to as this new year starts. Some of these are technologies, while others are policy areas or overall trends that have been emerging over the past few years.
Resilience
As I wrote about in my last newsletter, and also in my first post of 2025, and has been a theme in my recent writing and speaking for the Internet Society, I think we’re in a time when “resilience” is key. In the work I do, particularly with the Internet Society’s Pulse website, I’m focused on Internet resilience but as I wrote recently, I’m increasingly looking at the link between electrical / power resilience and Internet connectivity. For example, Puerto Rico had a massive power outage this past week that knocked out power for 90% of the island – and yet some amount of Internet connectivity continued. How do we do more of this and keep the Internet ON even without power from the grid?
All of this is part of the overall concern around climate resilience as we see more extreme weather and other challenges. I’m planning to spend several future newsletters exploring more around resilience.
Climate Tech
Related to resilience, there’s some fascinating work going on around technology to help either mitigate our impact on the climate or adapt to the ongoing changes. Last year I spent 12 weeks as a Fellow at Climatebase and it was an excellent experience to learn about the current state of climate tech. There are no silver bullets, of course, that will magically decrease our impact, but there are so many solutions for different problems that people are working on. It’s an exciting – and hopeful – area of activity!
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites
Anyone who has followed me on social media knows that “LEOs” are an area of intense interest for me! Back in 2022 I led a team at the Internet Society that developed a “perspectives” document about using LEO-based satellites for Internet access. Systems such as Starlink from SpaceX, and OneWeb from Eutelsat offer amazing opportunities to extend Internet access to the remotest corners of the world. The high speed, low latency connectivity can be very literally life-changing, but there are some definite tradeoffs and challenges we as a society have to accept.
So much has happened in the last 2 years! And I expect 2025 to be a VERY busy year with LEOs, particularly as Elon Musk’s proximity to incoming President Trump may accelerate some of SpaceX’s activities. The incoming FCC Chair has also said he wants to see fewer barriers to LEO system deployment. And… there are SO MANY companies and startups vying to be active in LEO-based connectivity, in countries all over the world. In 2025 we should see Amazon’s Project Kuiper get into orbit. There are a couple of Chinese constellations launching. Several more are in the works to launch.
The skies are going to be crowded! (Much to the disappointment of astronomers everywhere…)
Age-gating the Internet
A worrisome trend is that policymakers around the world seem to have decided that THIS is the time when they should pass laws to “protect children” and restrict access to parts of the Internet to only adults. To be clear, for as long as I’ve been online (40+ years now) there have always been concerns about how to restrict access by minors to some content. And as a father of two daughters, I completely understand the concerns.
BUT… there still isn’t a way to easily do this. Back in September 2024, the Internet Society joined several other organizations in filing an amicus brief explaining that existing technology just doesn’t work and creates serious security and privacy concerns for adults.
But this hasn’t stopped policymakers. Australia declared that in December 2025 all social media apps should not be available to anyone under 16. Never mind that the tech hasn’t been proven, they want to push compliance onto the platforms. A good number of US states have passed various laws. On January 15, 2025, the US Supreme Court will hear a case from Texas where the Texas Attorney General asserts that companies can “easily” do this.
This is going to continue to be a mess. And our privacy and security as individuals may wind up being “collateral damage” to many of these different well-intentioned laws.
WSIS+20 Review
This is a really wonky Internet policy area… but 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the UN event that set the stage for how “Internet governance” is addressed at the UN level and also created the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) annual event. A key point is that it was declared to be “multistakeholder” and involve not just governments but people from all across society. In recent years, there have been some governments and others who would like to stuff the proverbial genie back in a bottle and change back to a “multilateral” process where only governments are involved with setting decisions about online governance.
This year will be the “WSIS+20” review and will set the stage for how governments engage within the UN framework around Internet policy issues – and whether we all have a voice. Colleagues of mine at the Internet Society wrote about why this is so important. We’ll see where this all goes in 2025.
AI, quantum, virtual worlds, neurotechnology, and everything else
Of course I’m also continuing to watch what’s going on in the world of generative AI – how can you NOT given the current level of hype? There are some definite cool aspects of the “data center-scale auto-complete” that we have today, but definite challenges, too. (Ex. The environmental and energy impact of massive data centers being built for AI apps.) It will be interesting to see what new capabilities 2025 brings.
Other topics:
- Quantum technologies also seem to be getting ever-closer to being something that could be used outside of research environments.
- Virtual worlds / metaverse / spatial computing continue to advance (ex Roblox now has 80 million daily active users).
- Some of these new augmented reality (AR) glasses seem to be gaining ground.
- Digital identity systems are something to watch (particularly related to age-gating).
- Advances in neurotechnology are helping many people, but there are also some scary, Orwellian aspects to some of the tech.
- 3D printing and other material development is an area I think may disrupt our society in more ways than is immediately apparent.
- Radio spectrum will be a major battleground for communication technologies.
- There are fascinating advances happening in medical technology.. for example, can we get to cancer treatments that are more like scalpels than sledgehammers?
- and…
- and…
… there are just SO many fascinating new technologies emerging!
What are YOU watching in 2025? Please do drop me an email or reply on social media to share where your attention is focused.
[The End]
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Dan
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Disclaimer
Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.
