There is almost nothing to prevent the Internet from becoming a virtual Monte Carlo as gambling interests around the world aim to separate you from your hard-earned money. Expect to be playing a slot machine right on your desktop, with nobody there to stop the action … I’d advise everyone to keep an eye on their money clip. If the gamblers don’t get it, the tax man will.
Digital data, and bandwidth for digital data, is going to be cheaper and more plentiful. Digitally distributed information is going to be available at lower and lower cost.
All of Congress’ proposals violate the First Amendment and privacy rights of adults to communicate freely in the online environment. Congress is making it ever more clear that we will have to turn to the courts to uphold free speech in the promising new medium of cyberspace.
As we get newer and better compression alogrithms for video and still-frame images, we’ll approach the next major leap in desktop computing: video on the desktop.
The Senate has taken the first step toward banning the electronic love note … We do not need to turn the FBI into the Keystone Kops of cyberspace, stumbling about on the lookout for indecent speech to protect our children … The Exon amendment would make the information superhighway one of the most censored segments of the communications media when logic dictates it should be the least censored … The new communications technologies hold out great promise. They must be allowed to develop free from government interference.
As networks continue to be interconnected, the potential for damage ranges from the theft of an electronic message to the interception of private video conversation.
The information highway will be able to sort consumers according to much finer distinctions [than today’s television and print publications], and to deliver (to) each a different stream of advertising … Data can be gathered and disseminated without violating anyone’s privacy because the interactive network will be able to use information about consumers to route advertising without revealing which specific households received it … Some of the billions of dollars now spent annually on media advertising, and on the printing and postage of direct-mail advertising, will instead be divvied up among consumers who agree to watch or read ads sent directly to them as messages.
A communications network that could transmit terabits (trillions of bits) of information could open the full resources of a reserach library to every home, school, office and laboratory. For these scenarios to materialize, physicists and engineers must devise methods to use more of an optical fiber’s capacity. A single fiber could, in theory, transport 25 terabits each second, an amount sufficient to carry simultaneously all the telephone calls in the U.S. on Mother’s Day.
A network must be saddled with more expensive and complex electronics, and it becomes more difficult to process the smaller pulses of light needed to transmit tens of gigabits (a gigabit is a billion bits) of digital information in a second’s time. Above a certain transmission speed – about 50 gigabits per second – electronic equipment will find it hard to handle this constant back-and-forth transformation between electrons and light waves. It would be simpler, faster and more economical to transfer an optical signal from one end of a network to the other by using the properities of the light wave itself to route the transmission along different pathways through the network.
It won’t be long before the Internet resembles a suburban nightmare … The power and appeal of online services is that people with common interests can find each other. Newsgroups, mailing lists and on-line chat represent the most powerful, lowest cost “narrowcasting” media invented. In the future, such narrow – but highly qualified – market segments will be attracted to visit next-generation Web servers by information and “newsgroups on steroids.” As a baseline, these servers will offer improved graphics, security and transaction processing for the “store.” Online chat will let customers speak with salespeople and, more important, let customers to speak with each other. It will even enable “celebrity visits” to the store, just as authors visit bookstores today.