This year and the next few are going to be great, fun, exciting, mind-blowing, challenging (and tiring) times to be participating in the Internet as it transitions from grand experiment to one lane of the (sorry, gotta say it once) Information Super-Duper-Highway.
Arguably, the biggest challenge the Internet faces is the millions of new users suddenly set loose on it, with little or no cyber-training in “netiquette,” few controls and often little accountability – and great expectations of what the Internet should offer and what they should be “entitled” to do.
If the Internet is to truly act as a giant distributed filing system and global computer, services need to become scalable as demand grows. If the request load on the Library of Congress goes up by a thousand, we need a way (translation: monetary compensation) to sustain it. Equally, if people go looking for, say, the current version of Doom, search facilities should be smart enough to locate and point to a local copy first before flagging copies a continent away.
ThereÕs oceans of information we can’t yet get via the Internet. Let’s bring a full lake’s worth up. And let’s get some real end-user information search/browse/navigate/view tools which help us use the wealth of Internet services and resources.
The Internet remains, among other things, “the Full Employment Act for Librarians” for the next decade. We need legions of librarians to catalog, label and organize what’s out there; we need top- and lower-level menus that present information “cut” in many directions, labeled so we can find things when we don’t know the right keywords. It’s past time that Internet users had access to comprehensive, usable global indexes and tools that search them. We’re drowning in private-label directories and “yellow pages.” Where’s the “global WHOIS” Internet directory people-looker-upper?
Hopefully within one year, definitely within three, no users (or program) should ever have to send passwords over the Internet in sniffable cleartext … We should be able to make financial commitments safely and securely – the ability to insert our credit card numbers securely within encrypted e-mail and to authenticate remote service use and product purchases charged to our accounts
My real hopes for the next few years are solutions to the outstanding technical, procedural and political bottlenecks standing in the way of true Internet growth … Bandwidth to the user remains the ultimate bottleneck for Internet or any more-than-ASCII interactive use … Whether data-over-cable will materialize remains to be seen; my crystal ball tersely suggests “technical support, security and assured bandwidth problems remain nontrivial.”
The really big news in the coming years will be the intersection (but hopefully not the collision) of mainstream corporate-accepted applications and Internet apps, so that corporate users can access Internet information from their current clients (Notes, Word, PowerPoint and Acrobat Reader); and leading corporate data formats.
The basic process of “connecting to the Internet” and using its “basic services” will become a simple, workable, shrinkwrapped or even built-in capability … Users will still want to be involved in making the choice of account providers, but starter lists will be built-in or auto-dialed, software will be preinstalled, and account-specific configuration will become truly simple.
The smell of money has finally awakened the telcos to the Internet as a marketable “product.” In September, MCI suddenly showed TCP/IP and Internet services; AT&T ads pump the word ‘Internet’ at the top; CompuServe rolled out TCP/IP network services alongside its account-oriented offerings. One report placed Sprint up into No. 2 position in Internet connectivity providers, displacing Usenet. The ICXs are in position to aggressively price Internet connectivity. How well they can deliver remains to be seen. Still needed are national/international dial-up access networks for travelers and for users in remote areas without IAP/IPPs in local-calling reach. Also needed are by-the-hour ”net terminals” in airports, hotels, libraries and convention centers. The number and range of free and pay-for-access information, resources and services available via the Internet will literally explode.