Free-Market Internet: [In this scenario,] thousands of individual entrepreneurs …small businesses and large communications empires set up shop on the Information Superhighway in a free-market version of the Internet. While there would probably be a “toll charge” to tour the highway, the customer could freely visit available service providers, paying only for services actually rendered. Quite likely, there would be a number of free public access services.
Predictor: Hoffman, Donna L.
Prediction, in context:Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management present three development scenarios for the “information superhighway” in a 1994 article for The Owen Manager. The third reads:”Scenario Three: ‘Free-Market Internet.’ In the third scenario, thousands of individual entrepreneurs (‘mom-and-pop shops’), small businesses and large communications empires set up shop on the Information Superhighway in a free-market version of the Internet. While there would probably be a ‘toll charge’ to tour the highway, the customer could freely visit available service providers, paying only for services actually rendered. Quite likely, there would be a number of free public access services, as well (cf. the Interstate rest stop with free maps, directions, and coffee). This scenario retains both the wide-open spirit and the broad scope of the Internet. Distinctions between ‘customers’ and ‘service providers’ would blur, because given fairly modest resources any customer could become a service provider … as in the current Internet, the communication pattern would follow a ‘World Wide Web’ of linkages between millions of sometimes interchangeable customers and service providers. The Information Superhighway would serve as a true network for communication between and within customers and service providers … In the third scenario … people are likely to interact more. The fact that e-mail and personal communications are among the most popular categories of traffic on the Internet suggests that large numbers of people want and need to talk to each other and do not want to become passive information and entertainment receptacles in their homes … Using a computer program like Mosaic to ‘net surf’ radically demonstrates how different the Internet is from the passive interactive multimedia vision of 500 channels on your TV set … The experience is social, full of information and driven by curiosity. And the Internet already offers more than 10,000 actively interactive channels. The millions of current Internet users are unlikely to be satisfied with a vision of the Information Superhighway that is anything less than what already exists.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Owen Graduate School of Management Magazine: The Owen Manage
Title, headline, chapter name: Commercializing the Information Superhighway: Are We in for a Smooth Ride?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://elab.vanderbilt.edu/research/papers/html/manuscripts/smooth.ride.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Krout, Kevin M.