In a couple of years everyone will be able to put their head on my body. They’ll be able to decide, “I choose to ask Ed Asner this question instead of the one Conan asked.” No one will ever see me doing my talk show. They’ll see themselves doing their own talk show. They’ll be able to choose Rob Lowe as a guest instead of Ed Asner. They’ll get a computer-generated Rob Lowe. I’ll become a guy who just installs modem jacks.
Record labels, book publishers and television networks are pushing their talent to appear online with a kind of blind faith that cyberspace is the wave of the future. “We don’t want to wake up one day and say, ‘This is interesting – we should have done it.'”
The fact of the matter is that it is an unstoppable explosion. Yet that explosion is now threatening to consume the Internet itself … the Internet Society … predicted last year that the routing table system could break down as early as 1997 … IPv6 – which distributes the routing responsibility more widely, easing the burden on central computers, all the while aiming to enhance message security – may be the most fundamental change in Internet for more than a decade.
[The Internet is] “colliding with America – it’s ignoring an enormous legal, cultural, and political culture.” Working with that culture, he suggested, “will be a lot harder than anything they’ve done before.”
Anyone who thinks Net culture will survive the influx of billions of dollars doesn’t know that millions of those billions will be spent on lawyers.
Because the present system awards each network a minimum of 256 addresses – even though there may only be 10 computers in the network – the Internet may run out of addresses by 2005. Longer addresses should push the day of reckoning centuries into the future.
The Internet will evolve the way we make it evolve. It’s the first time the use of technology depends on how we want it. In this age, we’re dissatisfied with large institutional efforts, so this means bringing it closer to people, making it more responsive to individual citizens.
By 2000 there will be 300 million users online.
New bandwidth is very cheap. People have been saying the Net will grind to a halt, first because of newsgroups, then video, then advertising, but it simply hasn’t happened.
It would be a mistake to try to solve the universal service problem all at once because in 10 years the Internet may be using wireless or satellite technology. It’s always a moving target.