In the next 10 years, somebody will figure out how to charge for information over the Net, so you won’t get things necessarily for free. That will have several good effects, including a way to pay authors for their work. And because of the economic incentive, it will become easier to filter out the good from the bad.
The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions.
The Internet is not the key to the future. It’s not going to provide great, wonderful information. Instead, it will continue to provide a rather mundane view of our very, very mundane world.
The terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City has breathed new life into proposals designed to make it easier for the police to eavesdrop on electronic communications … “What can they do? Say no political organizing over the Internet? That’s clearly unconstitutional.”
What I’m working on is developing the sort of technology that can bring normal financial transactions and normal commerce to the Internet, so the Net will be more than just a business-to-business tool. Making it all happen is a huge task, and it will just facilitate a much wider use and appreciation of how cool the Net is.
A next step is the move to universal authorship, in which everyone involved in an area can contribute to the electronic representation of the group knowledge.
The existence of trillions of dollars of business transactions globally that is thus far unenabled by electronic catalogs and auction markets must be keeping product designers up late trying to figure out how to unlock the treasures there.
Network security will remain the hardest nut to crack (bad pun) for many years to come. Why? Because security itself is a perpetual problem. As long as we have humans around, anyway … Many vendors and researchers are working on ways to extend the firewall concept to full-function Internetworking. They will not be done tomorrow.
Users should beware that there is no general guarantee that a URL which at one time points to a given object continues to do so, and does not even at some later time point to a different object due to the movement of objects on servers. The use of URLs containing passwords is clearly unwise.
I’m not against the Internet. I just want people to be more skeptical about it. People are skeptical about nuclear power and genetic engineering and a lot of other areas but they blindly accept the Internet. We techies should be more honest about what computers can do and what they cannot do, or else we are setting ourselves up for a big pie in the face.