The basic infrastructure of the Internet – which was designed to zip data around unpoliced – still hasn’t been modified to make sure that snoops and thieves can’t grab private information off your computers or read your e-mail. Meanwhile, dozens of companies are making plans to introduce digitized forms of money – but can we trust them?
People are accustomed to a certain environment on the Internet and they can’t quite envision a time when the Internet will be a marketplace in which people want to sell valuable products.
My worst nightmare would be to have the Internet turn into something that eroded civil liberties and free speech.
Perhaps the biggest short-term danger to the Net is the prospect of millions of newbies jumping on the boat so fired up by, uh, laudatory magazine articles that they confuse the promise with the current reality.
The Net will include TV, radio, all the cash-register data in the world, every traffic sensor in the world. It won’t be just people talking to each other. It will be people talking to machines, and machines talking to each other.
Whole industries might go away, particularly those involved in modes of distribution that will evaporate when businesses can send the same materials direct to customers over the Net. New sorts of ventures will certainly emerge, but we can’t be sure what they’ll be.
As a higher share of the population gets wired, business will reshape itself to take advantage of the instant communication with customers the Net will provide.
In the long run, it’s hard to exaggerate the importance of the Internet. It really is about opening communications to the masses.
Microsoft gave its reply on Dec. 7 [1995], announcing that it was throwing all its considerable weight toward the Internet “tidal wave.” It endorsed Java, Sun Microsystems’ competing computer language for generating lively interactive Web pages, and announced that it would gear its applications to work with the Internet. “The Internet is pervasive in everything we’re doing,” said Bill Gates.
The seamless and transparent access to multiple heterogeneous databases with intelligent, integrated run-time reasoning is the major component of a large knowledge-base effort. NSA will develop a prototype environment of the future where the end-user of the data, the application builder, and the data administrator all see, not a collection of relatively unintelligible, difficult-to-access databases, but an integrated information space in terms directly meaningful and accessible to them.