Trends In Information Technology Law: Looking Ahead To 2019

This piece looks ahead to what we might expect as IT law developments in 2019.

You can tell that digital transformation really is well under way when commentators who in past years have freely given just 10 top IT predictions for next year start to signal '31 Tech Predictions for 2019' (inc.com), '60 cybersecurity predictions for 2019' (Forbes) or put their entire set of 23 2019 prediction reports behind a paywall (Forrester). So, at the risk of over simplification, I'll nail colours to the mast and go for the cloud, AI and data as what's coming up for IT lawyers in 2019.

Brexit

First, though, let's clear the Brexit decks. At the time of writing (early December) withdrawal from the EU at 23.00 on 29 March 2019 is planned to be followed by a transition period ending on 31 December 2020 so, other things being equal, the UK's legal relationship with the EU during 2019 (and 2020) will be largely unchanged from today. If however Brexit takes place without agreement, then IT and IP lawyers will be grappling after 29 March with intricate technical legal questions of divergence particularly around GDPR, copyright, database right and exhaustion of rights (the EU law free movement of goods principle that IP right holders cannot assert their rights to prevent resale of their goods once sold in the EU with their consent).

Quantum Computing (QC) and Blockchain

Further out, QC is set to change the fundamentals of computer processing (and Rigetti Computing launched first QC as a Service (QCaaS) in September 2018), but it will be after 2019 that QC uptake starts in earnest, with cryptography and security likely the first commercial use case areas. Similarly, although blockchain has the capacity to reshape high volume, low value record-based business operations (like asset tracking, identity management, patient health records and B2C insurance) and there are already around 100 commercial applications for the technology today, it will be after 2019 when blockchain enters the commercial mainstream.

The Cloud

The first of two IT law predictions I'd be pretty confident about for 2019 it's that there will be many more cloud contracts coming across IT lawyers' desks next year. A central feature of digital transformational is the epic migration now underway in enterprise (large organisation) computing from 'on premise' - traditional IT infrastructure at the user - to 'in-cloud'. Wikibon, the open source technology knowledge sharing community, projects that the cloud's share of enterprise computing will grow from 10% currently to 45% by 2026 (see Figure 1 below).

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