The Net will become more important to more people, as they use it for business and increasingly important personal transactions. This will make disputes over access rights and exclusion much more likely.
There will be more commercial transactions, as opposed to information barter, on the Net. This will lead to a new set of questions regarding electronic contract formation. It will also lead to more disputes.
As the Net grows, there will be an increasing percentage of participants who have no prior experience with computer communications or Net culture, don’t know who they are talking to or where they are, and don’t have complete control over what they are doing. This will lead to more disputes.
We hope to hasten the day when a student in his living room can browse through the electronic index of the Library of Congress, retrieve a specific document and have it printed on his laser printer, within the space of minutes.
Computer-based communications is a new medium that will be as important as print was in the 14th century. There is a larger transformation going on.
Homes will come equipped with LANs that link most appliances, so power companies can adjust electrical peak demand and that enable remote diagnostics to run on computer-controlled devices. Internet services will be readily accessible and interworkable with video services. Computer software will help set up teleconference calls from home, support telecommuting – which will be mandated in more states where pollution from commuting has become a major problem – and enable multi-party games.
It could be that some scientific field will be the first to be sufficiently disciplined to input its data not just as cool hypertext, but in a machine-readable form, allowing programs to wander the globe analyzing and surmising … The knowledge-engineering field has to learn how to be global, and the Web has to learn knowledge engineering, but in the end this might be a way in which again the scientific field leads the world into something very powerful, and a new paradigm shift.
The question will be, can [high-speed distributed computing] be done? The money is there if the help can be found … In the next 10 years, the industry will see a reemergence of systems integrators to bring all these pieces together and make them work.
When we jump to gigabit speeds, it will be a revolutionary shift.
Reasonable competition speeds the pace of innovation. Companies will promote the proprietary aspects of their browsers and applications, and they should. But the navigation of the Web has to be open. If the day comes when you need six browsers on your machine, the World Wide Web will no longer be the World Wide Web.