Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

Commercial Scenarios for the Web: Opportunities and Challenges

Profitability from commercial activity on the Web includes productivity savings, marketing and sales savings, and incremental or new revenue streams. Productivity savings arise from reduction in order and processing costs and more efficient inventory management … Savings result through reduced brochure printing and distribution costs and reductions in order-taking as customers use fill-out forms to prepare their own orders. As control is also effectively transferred to the customer, we speculate that customer satisfaction might actually be increased. Finally, incremental or new revenue streams are available for firms participating in digital commerce, through, for example, online sales, advertising revenues, or information brokering … Corporate training, electronic distribution and maintenance provide additional revenue opportunities for appropriate firms. However, secure mechanisms for transactions are necessary to fully exploit the revenue-generating opportunities of the Web.

Commercial Scenarios for the Web: Opportunities and Challenges

The primary barrier to consumer adoption of the Web as a commercial medium is ease of access … Ease of access is a multidimensional construct and includes high-speed access (the “bandwidth” problem), ease of finding a service provider, and the diffusion of the computer hardware/software/modem bundle into the home. The secondary barriers are ease of use, price, and risk, including such factors as privacy and security. Ease of use includes issues such as the user-friendliness of the software, ease of software installation, and the like. The marketplace will weed out even technically feasible Web applications if they prove too complicated for the average consumer to use. Hence attempts to develop technology that is user-friendly are as important as the development of the technology itself.

Ethical Issues in Computer Networking: Academic Freedom, Usenet, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech

I think that it’s a wonderful thing that our network provides identified volitional spaces like alt.bondage and alt.dykes.on.bikes. We should have choice, not regulation, and one of those choices ought to be spaces in which we can maintain anonymity so as to conduct things that may be viewed as offensive by other people. I feel that the notion of enforcing normative values is completely inimical to the idea of freedom. The norm is a statistical construct, there aren’t any people that are normal.

Ethical Issues in Computer Networking: Academic Freedom, Usenet, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech

Emerging ethical issues in computer networking include freedom of speech, censorship, privacy, anonymity, harassment, and the carriage of offensive material (including hate literature, defamatory material, and sexually explicit material, usually considered to be of a pornographic nature). Despite the often fevered pitch of concern and urgency surrounding these issues, which touch upon contemporary free speech and censorship debates, they have yet to be adequately addressed by computer ethicists … What constitutes electronic free speech or harassment or slander? What is the line between public and private information, and between rights and misappropriation? … How have contemporary debates over pornography, censorship, and free speech impacted upon the debates on academic freedom, censorship, and computers? How are new legal remedies for computer networking being framed in light of current legal and regulatory mechanisms for other communication technologies?

RFC1251

The Internet has grown because it solves simple problems in a simple a manner as possible. Putting together a huge Internet has not been easy. We still do not know how to do routing in a huge Internet. When you add the real world requirement of commercial security and the desire for Ôclasses of serviceÕ we are faced with big challenges. I think this means that we have to get a lot more involved with operational provisioning considerations such as those that the phone companies and credit card firms have wrestled with. Hopefully we can do this and still maintain the rather friendly attitude that Internetters have always had.

RFC1251

Researchers from universities, non-profit and industrial organizations are eager to communicate; new applications are being developed which will enable them to interact more and more closely … and will pose the networking challenge of realizing a very large, very powerful Internet.

RFC1251

The Internet is a grand collaboration of over 5,000 networks involving millions of users, hundreds of thousands of hosts and dozens of countries around the world. It may well do for computers what the telephone system has done for people: provided a means for international interchange of information which is blind to nationality, proprietary interests, and hardware platform specifics.