Dan York

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]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

• My Themes for 2025
• The Dan York Report episode 418: The 25th Anniversary of the Y2K Bug

Content I’ve published for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

• No Power = No 1s and 0s. Internet Resilience Requires Electrical Resilience

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

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.

Climbing back up into the crow’s nest and turning the spyglass toward the southeastern United States, it’s hard to escape the utter devastation caused by the cascading effects of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. The photos are unbelievable. The stories are heartbreaking. The recovery costs will be enormous. And the people responding are amazing! (And the disinformation is despicable!)

All of that has brought me back to this theme of “resilience” that has been percolating through my work for the past year or so. I have stories exploding inside my head that I want to write here.. so my plan is to start with my next issue on the theme of “Building Resilience” – both the network kind and the human kind, and both at a community and personal level. I just want to capture some of my own thoughts and thinking… and will invite you to come along with that exploration.

Meanwhile, I want to talk about two efforts happening RIGHT NOW to respond to the hurricanes in the southeast US…

The western part of North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helene. Many people might not have heard of Asheville, NC, before… but now they do. The whole are needs severe help! And soon!

Aaron Huslage, who I’ve known for many years, lives in North Carolina and in response launched Operation Connect Carolina to help restore connectivity. He’s got a team of people working hard to build mobile hotspots that can be moved out into western NC and deployed. You can follow the journey on the project’s Facebook page or LinkedIn page.

Most importantly, he’s seeking donations to help his local teams get these hotspots out to where people need them.

The second effort is the volunteers of the IT Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC). The organization has deployed throughout the region providing WiFi access and charging stations. If you are in the region, or know people who are, please share their map of WiFi locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Additionally, if you have some IT experience / background and are located in the USA, you can sign up to volunteer with the ITDRC. Volunteers are needed to deploy out into the field to help get these trailers set up and then to keep them up and running, and to generally help people with connectivity in the local community. It’s going to be a long haul to get connectivity restored all across the affected region, and to ITDRC is planning to be there for a while. They’ll need more volunteers to help keep all these systems going. There are also opportunities to provide remote support if you don’t have the ability to go out into the field for a couple of weeks (typically a 2-week deployment).

I’ve been an ITDRC volunteer since 2021 and while I have not yet deployed into the field (I need to finish up one last FEMA training course) I have learned a huge amount from the ITDRC training programs and community.

You can also donate to ITDRC as it is entirely a nonprofit operation. They’ve received multiple grants (including from the Internet Society Foundation, affiliated with my employer) which helps, but they do need all the support possible.

At the same time they are also supporting wildfire response out in the western United States. There are many communities in crisis that need connectivity!

If you are able to help with either effort… THANK YOU!

Next time, I intend to write a bit more about building resilience…

P.S. As you may notice, ITDRC only operates in the US. If you live elsewhere in the world and are active with a similar IT-related crisis response organization, please drop me an email with the info, as I’d love to share info. The NetHope organization includes members in other regions who do similar work.

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

• The Day York Report episode 417: Returning From A Hiatus

Content I’ve published for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

• <nothing>

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

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.