Yesterday’s garage shop is today’s billion-dollar enterprise. Policies for the NPN should therefore not only accommodate existing information industry interests, but anticipate and promote the next generation of entrepreneurs.
The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory. Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by quoting the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist, Walt Kelley. I commend his words to all the technological utopians and messiahs present. “We have met the enemy,” Pogo said, “and he is us.”
Industrialism, the ethos encapsulating the values and technologies of Western civilization, is seriously endangering stable social and environmental existence on this planet, to which must be opposed the values and techniques of an organic ethos that seeks to preserve the integrity, stability, and harmony of the biotic communities, and the human community within it.
A fee structure prohibitive to large sectors of society could create an information oligarchy, further delineating class divisions and disenfranchising the computer uninitiated.
Demographically precise user profiles can be compiled by providers. These can be sold to vendors for marketing purposes. They also could be supplied to employers, creditors and the government for any number of purposes.
The future in business computing, of course, will be to create documents that are also interactive. So our challenge is to incorporate those innovations in Microsoft Office.
A number of academic and commercial forecasters have suggested that the media of the future will involve as much activity on the side of the consumer of news as it does on the side of the provider of that information. The news customer of the future will gather information from personalized sources as well as sources intended for a mass audience. The ends of this spectrum of activity correspond to the range of possible positions between local and global news perspectives.
TCP/IP and all that are supposed to make everything work together. Sure, just like the United Nations makes the human race work together! It’s an admirable goal, but we’re never going to get there.
Government can’t afford to pay for a data superhighway, … a viable network could be fashioned much less expensively from the current telephone network.
If completed, [NREN] would raise the capacity of the Internet to more than 3 billion bits – the equivalent of 300 copies of “Moby Dick” – per second, up from 45 million bits, the capacity of the current backbone of Internet.