My view is that in 10 years the internet will either be a completely different place with new protocols or be in meltdown. The internet is a mess, technically and content-ly.

In terms of relative signficance to country's economies :

In 2010, the internet economy in the G20 group of leading nations was worth $2.3tn - larger than the economies of Italy or Brazil, but a mere 4.1% of the total size of all G20 economies. [bbc.co.uk...]
Whoever dominates this, indirectly influences policy and business across those nations. No wonder regulators and business needs to be wary.

Sponsored by Google and by Google pushing social.

* about 80% of all internet users will access the web from a mobile

They need to define mobile much more accurately, mobile phones, iPads, tablet PCs, Netbooks, Lap tops.?.?.? Hey, I can easily predict such a broad swathe. Let's just say about 20% of us will still be using fairly fixed work stations! So where does that put hotdesking with laptops?

* the internet will go social, and allow customers and companies to engage with each other

Social will be important to some/many people however my prediction is that their predictions will be wrong:-)

Privacy is going to become more important as more securiity breaches occur, that's inevitable, and as people use far superior methods of sharing their social data than posting it in public.

Just how naïve are these researchers? Do they honestly believe that until now customers and companies on whatever level have never engaged with each other?

Oooops...I forgot, we're probably referring to graduate corporate ostriches here.

My view is that in 10 years the internet will either be a completely different place

Completely different. We're still in the Wild West, but rules and restrictions are coming to everyone about what you say, where you go, what you upload/download, etc.

It's not (necessarily) rules and restrictions but protocols that need to change.

So-called standards such as web and mail are wide open to abuse and so far they have only been (badly) patched. A new patch announced today-ish - DMARC - is only the latest patch for mail, for example, and does not address the fundamental protocol security issues. In particular, it does not address the issue of spam being sent by the "top" agencies' webmail sites for such as G, Y, hotmail and AOL.