E-mail dominates the Internet, and it’s likely to remain the dominant use of the Internet in the future. Nonetheless, I expect to see an exciting array of other applications which become heavily used and cause a change in the perception of the Internet as primarily a “mail system.”
From the first time I saw the Web in March ’93. I believed that it was going to be the information superhighway and that proprietary services were going to die.
I expect to see T1 connections become the norm for the types of institutions that are now on the Internet. Higher speeds, including speeds up to a gigabit will become available. At the same time, I expect to see a vast expansion of the Internet, reaching into a significant fraction of the schools and businesses in this country and elsewhere in the world.
It seems likely that the Internet will continue to be the environment of choice for the deployment of new protocols and for the linking of diverse systems in the academic, government, and business sectors for the remainder of this decade and well into the next.
The 1990s will continue this exponential growth phase. The other scary thing is that we are beginning to see experimentation with packet voice and packet video. I fully anticipate that an Internet TV guide will show up in the next couple of years.
Internet will become a less U.S.-centric and more international operation. Much of the Internet will be operated by commercial concerns on a a profit-making basis, thereby opening up the Internet to unrestricted use. The telephone companies, including both the local exchange carriers and the interexchange carriers, will start providing some of the protocol stack other than the point-to-point lines.
Unlike the craze for baggy jeans and Pogs, this isn’t just some passing fad. Market researchers predict the number of kids online could triple by the end of 1998. So when the big bills come – and they will – parents will have only themselves to blame for bringing computers and online services home with them.
You will be accessing the Internet through your cable system instead of through the phone system. Technologies are blending.
What must be implemented globally, by common agreement, is the format of the in/out tag in packets, and the semantics that out packets receive congestion indications first … The scheme can implement a wider range of services than just the expected capacity scheme.
Computers may change the way we do things … or at least may change the scale and speed of transactions in … but the established rules – and moral principles embodied in those rules – cannot be ignored. Working out policies regarding computers calls, in part at least, for extending, modifying, or adapting extant rules.