The Society should be sure its new protocols support personal use, and they should exploit ISDN. ISDN won’t replace high-speed Internet trunks, but it will greatly improve personal Internet use from small offices and home offices. And ISDN has something else that the Internet needs: measured-usage billing.
A real challenge is how long AOL can keep the interest of companies like The New York Times … now beginning to see its own way through the world of cyberspace.
The “magic” of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.
The third-generation Internet must exploit ATM with cell-based protocols, operating systems, and applications.
The age of the public sphere as face-to-face talk is clearly over: The question of democracy must henceforth take into account new forms of electronically mediated discourse.
The Microsoft Network promises to be a formidable rival for America Online.
Windows 95 could be running on up to 65 million PCs by the end of 1996, all of them a mouse-click away from the Microsoft Network – a huge advantage that [America Online chief executive Steve] Case claims is patently unfair.
The Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers.
The fundamental question facing America Online is not whether it can keep up with excessive demand in the future. It’s whether there’s going to be any demand at all.
The newly formed Internet Society projects – with tongue in cheek, I assume – that the Internet will connect every human on Earth by 2001. Well before that date, however, the Internet will outgrow TCP/IP.