The main threat to Internet freedoms aren't hackers or terrorists but governments and corporations that want to stifle these freedoms to advance their agendas.

A just released Pew Research study conducted as part of its Project Internet Freedom said government and corporate interests gravely threaten the Internet freedoms that have led to the free and ubiquitous Internet we have today.

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The study asked thousands of thinkers, businesspeople, analysts and technology leaders to consider what the Internet might look like in a decade -- and what most concerned them. Pew conducted the survey to mark its 25th anniversary.

The study pinpointed four main threats to the Internet as it exists today:

• Government meddling
• Loss of trust in government and business firms
• Corporate control of the Internet
• Backlash against "Too Much Information" or TMI

The threats all spring from unrelenting government surveillance, crackdowns against dissidents and interference in freedom of speech worldwide, according to experts.

"Deteriorating trust, meddling by nations and pressure from commercial interests are the threats to the future of the Internet that technology experts fear most," said Michael Starks, an information science professional.

Meddling by countries is considered the gravest threat to Internet freedoms. Actions by states to maintain security and political control will lead to higher levels of blocking, filtering, segmentation and balkanization of the Internet, noted David Allen, an academic and advocate engaged with the development of global internet governance.

"Unfortunately, the supposed beacons of democracy in the West have all too often also proven they too can violate the basic norms," he said.

Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said censorship remains a major threat to the Internet worldwide.

"More than one-third of those who access the Internet are accessing a censored version of it and that number continues to grow. We need to continue the development of circumvention tools, and also ensure that those tools provide security."

Trust in governments will continue to evaporate because of an unending stream of revelations about government and corporate surveillance that will certainly increase in the future despite these revelations.

"Because of governance issues (and the international implications of the NSA reveals), data sharing will get geographically fragmented in challenging ways. The next few years are going to be about control," believes Danah Boyd, a research scientist for Microsoft Corporation.

Internet freedoms will continue to be threatened by inconsistent privacy protection and the inconsistent protection against exploitation.

Corporate control of the Internet is being driven by a desire among firms to secure a massive competitive advantage in a digital marketplace dominated by the Internet.

"Commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life," claims Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist at SRI International.

The Internet is also in danger from companies that view it in TV terms, or as a marketplace where you buy content as you do with cable programming.

"This by far is the most serious threat to sharing information on the net because it undermines and sidelines the net's heterogeneous and distributed system for supporting everybody and everything, and biases the whole thing to favor a few vertically-integrated 'content' industries," said Doc Searls, director of ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Too Much Information will do little to improve the lives of individuals or societies. The growth in access to more content will do little to improve the lives of individuals or societies, said Stark.

"It will continue to become easier for people around the world to exchange ever greater amounts of content. ... The challenge will be in separating the wheat from the chaff."

Efforts to fix the TMI problem could over-compensate and lead to thwarting content sharing, believe some experts.

They noted that predictions about the Internet's future are rooted in attacks on free expression. Government blocking and filtering the Internet is already occurring.

More ominously, the idea that dissent against the wealthy should be filtered is gaining ground, as shown by the European Union's decision to filter unfavorable coverage about the wealthy and powerful.

Tagsgovernment security, paranoia, mania, threat, internet freedom