Recently, senior staff at the Internet Society engaged in a scenario planning exercise to reveal plausible courses of events that could impact the health of the Internet in the future. The results of the exercise were subsequently reviewed with the Internet Society Board of Trustees who have, in turn, thrown it to the chapters for comment.

Scenarios always start from a question about the future. In this case, the focal question for the exercise was: “Will the world embrace or resist the open Internet model?” with a second-level question to narrow the field: “What model will be more successful? Command and control? Or, distributed and decentralized?”

The four imagined scenarios are:

• Common Pool Scenario
• Boutique Networks Scenario
• Moats and Drawbridges Scenario
• Porous Garden Scenario

The challenge for the Internet Society, and for everyone who cares about the Internet is to think about the possibilities and tendencies they prefer or want to avoid, and what they can do in their circumstances to help the Internet to evolve in a positive direction.The Internet Society community actively works to try to ensure that the Internet of the future will look most like the story called “The Common Pool”.

Please post comments either below and/or on the ISOC site.