Idiot’s Guide to the Net: From Boston’s Cyberbars to Siena’s Schoolrooms, Some of the Frequently Asked Questions About the Network that Connects Us All

The price of everything falls so rapidly and the efficiencies of the architecture are so great that the technology needed to use the Internet becomes nearly free. Large commercial enterprises keep to their own cybermalls, leaving the rest of cyberspace unpaved. A free-floating cybercash economy develops which has no connection with the Earth-bound banking system. The Internet evolves as a self-organizing, smoothly functioning anarchy. This is an extreme that has elements of the plausible.

Idiot’s Guide to the Net: From Boston’s Cyberbars to Siena’s Schoolrooms, Some of the Frequently Asked Questions About the Network that Connects Us All

I believe the Web will represent a half of all Internet traffic by the beginning of 1996 because it is the easiest and preferred way of presenting information, either for free or for sale.

Idiot’s Guide to the Net: From Boston’s Cyberbars to Siena’s Schoolrooms, Some of the Frequently Asked Questions About the Network that Connects Us All

We are worried about interactive video and voice requirements.’ This means that every part of the system will have to keep upgrading its capacity to provide for these new uses. The switches, for instance, will have to grow from the T-1 (at 1.5 Mbps) to T-3s (which at 45 Mbps carry most of today’s backbone traffic) or even OC-3s (155 Mbps) within six months to a year.

Idiot’s Guide to the Net: From Boston’s Cyberbars to Siena’s Schoolrooms, Some of the Frequently Asked Questions About the Network that Connects Us All

If you build a system robust enough to handle interactive video, everything else is free, essentially. All the more traditional applications, such as e-mail and file transfer, can just go along for the ride because their demands for bandwidth are so much smaller.

Digital Commerce: The Prospect of Internet Censorship Raises Troubling Issues for Business

I’d hate to see government succeed in doing in the interactive space what they’ve failed or chosen not to do in traditional publishing and broadcasting, which is to set moral standards by regulation rather than by individual choice.

Digital Commerce: The Prospect of Internet Censorship Raises Troubling Issues for Business

This proposal will have more than a chilling effect. It may well mean a cold death for everyone except very rich and very cautious media companies.

The Year of the Internet

In the next 12 months, you’ll be hearing plenty about “hot” Web pages, blazingly fast cable modems, $500 Internet terminals and cyberspace coverage of the presidential election. No matter that most people in the United States have yet to log on, let alone Net-surf. In 1996, maybe they will.

The Year of the Internet

I have heard people say the hype can’t last. But so far if you were to bet on that point of view you would have lost all your money. There are stakeholders in the Internet. They fix the problems. The bandwidth isn’t wide enough, we give more. If government tries to stop it, the Net reconnects around (borders).

The Year of the Internet

The network is wired to route around trouble.

The Year of the Internet

Perfect security on the Internet will never exist.