Although the Internet is growing fast, it will be a long time before computer terminals are as widely available as newspapers and televisions. Until then, only the technoliterati will be enfranchised with network access.
People will always use mail for business and personal communications … Electronic mail may represent the epitome of mail distribution, and the Internet may be the best vehicle.
Anyone can post messages to the Net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacaphony drowns out serious discussion. Online debates of tough issues are often polarized by messages taking extreme positions. It’s a great medium for trivia and hobbies, but not the place for reasoned, reflective judgment.
The future looks bright for electronic bulletin board systems.
The use of non-escrowed encryption would create a society that “protects pedophiles and criminals.”
Ideally, everyone who is a consumer online should have the potential to also be a provider on the network. Anyone should be able to run a Web site from their home or company. I’m pretty certain that’s not going to be an issue. Someone will try to put in the fix. But they’ll lose again. If so, this is the BBS of the future.
Institutional America has already voted, and it’s over. Get a Web. Our initial reaction on looking this over this month was that we had missed the party. The Web looked completely different than it did just six months ago. But in reality this all happened in ONE MONTH: October. It looked like somebody had set off a Web bomb. I would guess the number of Web sites essentially doubled in the last 30 days … An entire frontier of software development and “tool building” lies before us with this model … That leaves access and bandwidth. That will continue to be the big problem for most potential Internauts for the immediate future.
Bandwidth is a drug. The more you have, the more you want. As soon as cable and DSL are in general use we’ll fill it up with video and music to the point where that’s not enough again.
Let me set your mind to rest about security on the Internet: There IS NO SECURITY ON THE INTERNET, and I don’t think there can be.
ATM and fiber-optics will cause the industry to restructure. We’ll have new entrants. All the financial models will change. For example, it will become increasingly strange to charge for data communications on the basis of time.