Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

A Model for Cost Allocation and Pricing in the Internet

Once commercial Internet service becomes mature, customers will start to have more sophisticated expectations, and will be willing … to be able to pay differential rates for different services. Indeed, there is already evidence in the marketplace that there is a real need for service discrimination. The most significant complaint of real users today is that large data transfers take too long, and that there is no way to adjust or correct for this situation.

Building the Information Marketplace

Text, pictures, movies, software, designs and much more would move easily and rapidly over this substrate. By speeding up many to today’s tasks and making possible an almost unlimited number of new activities, this infrastructure should improve our economy and our way of life.

Building the Information Marketplace

Computers will become a truly useful part of our society only when they are linked by an infrastructure like the highway system and the electric power grid, creating a new kind of free market for information services. Imagine the United States without its highways. Our millions of cars, buses and trucks would be driven in our own back yards and neighborhood parking lots, with occasional forays by the daring few along the uncharted, unpredictable and treacherous dirt roads, full of unspeakable terrors. A ridiculous picture? Perhaps, but it is not far off the mark if we are talking not about transportation but about today’s computers and the exchange of information among them.

Paul Romer

Computers might permanently shift the relative payoffs between manufacturing and the process of search and discovery. If that’s correct, then the whole economy will start to look like Microsoft, with a very large fraction of people engaged in discovery as opposed to production. This implies a permanent change in the rate of discovery and the rate of economic growth … Things might never settle back down.

The Great Work

We believe that ISDN, whatever its limitations, is rapid enough to jump-start the greatest free market the world has ever known.

Farewell, PC – What’s Next?

The players most likely to shape this future will be the ones who shaped it a decade ago – small upstarts able to see the world in entirely new ways.

The Net as a Public Sphere?

The Net is something entirely new, and its effects on democratic politics can’t be predicted using historical precedent. The Internet threatens the government (unmonitorable conversations), mocks private property (the infinite reproducibility of information), and flaunts moral propriety (the dissemination of pornography). The technology of the Internet shouldn’t be viewed as a new form of public sphere. The challenge is to understand how the networked future might be different from what we have known.