What scares me, is if the phone or cable companies control the content that travels over the fiberoptic lines or cable … If that happens, it would be hard for anyone but big commercial concerns to get information out there.
If you want to hold users, the more you allow two-way communication, the more successful you’ll be.
Technology is developing to liberate people from the mind managers.
It’s so easy to imagine a scenario in which technology is used to get instant judgments from people. If it is used that way, we haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to high-tech lynchings.
Now we’ve got this damned airplane in flight; How do we change engines without crashing the thing?
While the Internet has tremendous potential for business, all is not boundless opportunity and easy profits … There will be pitfalls to developing interactive multimedia products and services on the Information Superhighway. A large mass market, deep pockets and previous mass-media experience alone will not guarantee success. Understanding what customers want, are willing to pay for, and what satisfies them remain deeply misunderstood or understood too little by many marketers.
[The Internet is] a fundamental transformation, [a] robust global mesh [of computers that allows] open collaboration in the hyperdevelopment and evolution of new technologies [and one that will] transform the structure, methods and individual skills within enterprises, institutions and professions of all kinds … A hundred years from now, history may well record the emergence and implementation of the Internet protocol as a profound turning point in the evolution of human communication – of much greater significance than the creation of the printing press.
What could limit the growth and usefulness of the Internet is its very power. A technology that can bring all the information from everywhere to your computer is useless unless it can also help you find what you really want, the people that you want to talk to, and the conversation that you want to join. So a crucial test of the viability of the Internet will be the development of filters for all that information: software agents, mail handlers and human intermediaries such as net searchers, conference moderators and digest editors.
The Internet, with its open, distributed structure, was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. If it can do that, it can withstand corporate America.
In this vision, the Net is thoroughly commercialized, produced by professionals, and carries a charge, or advertising or both. Publishing information on the Internet becomes so expensive that free or nearly free access to it by individuals almost ceases to exist.