One downside to the Internet’s growth will be a “substantial displacement of jobs,” as telephone companies lose business, Barker predicted. The result could also be a push by carriers for government regulation of the Internet.
Predictor: Barker, Ben
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Network World, Adam Gaffin talks with Internet pioneer Ben Barker just before he and a group of other Internet founders met for a gathering to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their invention. Gaffin writes: ”In 1969, Ben Barker was fresh out of Harvard when he took a job with BBN [early ARPANET switching contractor Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.] as a hardware engineer. One of his first jobs was to help convert a Honeywell Inc. computer into an interface messaging processor, essentially a router for what would become the ARPANET. Today, as a senior vice president and chief technology officer at BBN, Barker sees an Internet where the innovation may have only just started. But he said he worries about what will happen if government or time-based pricing hits the Internet. ‘It’s the very unregulated nature of it that makes it so appealing,’ he said. Anyone can become an information provider at little or no cost through the World Wide Web, which itself is an example of an application that has quickly spread across the Internet. The marginal cost of using the Net ‘makes it so that all kinds of clever people can develop clever applications,’ he said. One downside to the Internet’s growth will be a ‘substantial displacement of jobs,’ as telephone companies lose business, Barker predicted. The result could also be a push by carriers for government regulation of the Internet.”
Date of prediction: August 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: Employment
Name of publication: Network World
Title, headline, chapter name: Net Pioneers See No End to Their Grand Experiment; But Global Net Faces Political, Technical Tests
Quote Type: Partial quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
TOP NEWS; 25 Arpanet/Internet; Page 1
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Krout, Kevin M.