Elon University

Subtopic: General

The Internet Will Gain Popularity, Problems

Many of the commercial interests scrambling to mine gold in cyberspace will crash and burn, victims of their own inexperience in this unique world … A burgeoning Internet will also force society to confront traditional notions of free speech and intellectual property in new, sometimes uncomfortable ways. What happens to the idea of “community standards” when almost anyone with a computer and modem can become a self-publisher with global distribution? A flood of new users may spark an epidemic of busy signals, worries about data security and a potential boom in computer crime. As the Net throws open its cloistered universe, the real world – goblins and all – will come rushing in.

Chapter 8: The Net

Both the conscious plans of its constructors and what can be considered deeply “natural causes” led to the formation of a new kind of wilderness – a network of roots and vines so vast that it has the potential to modify everything it contacts and utterly change the very landscape of the forest.

Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net

Everybody knows that only those whose networks connect to everybody else’s have a chance to reach the enormous world market, but nobody knows yet which set of interests – newspapers, television networks, entertainment conglomerates, communication giants – will dominate the mass-market networks of the future.

Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net

A lot more than virtual communities and libraries of text are going to live on the Net in the near future. Digitization is where the future of the Net is likely to collide with other computer-amplified forces in the world … Money is already an abstraction, part of a huge, incessant, worldwide flow of electronic messages. The value gained now by knowing how to move these abstract money messages around the world’s telecommunications networks dwarfs the original value of the goods and services that produced the money.

Will Commercialization of Internet Help Libraries?

Commercial usage will change the basic nature of Internet, but said it will not be either “for better or worse, it’s just that more commerce is going to get conducted over Internet.” Competition for customers could increase access to Internet and Wolff is positive that having more users will drive connection prices down. “Absolutely, period,” he said. “The telecommunications industry is categorized by enormous economies of scale. All of that is independent of the NSF and what we’re doing.”

Tech Forum Sees Future – Maybe

[The Internet] will crash and be the big joke of our day. It’s actually two users logging on 10 million times each. [Bill Gates] will lose more money in one day than anyone else in the history of the world.

The Marc Andreessen Interview Page

All of this stuff is being driven out of the computer industry, as opposed to the cable industry or any other industry. The television industry, or whatever. So, I think what the computer industry is doing is sort of where it’s going to be leading.

The Marc Andreessen Interview Page

Congestion is only ever a problem if bandwidth is standing still. I don’t think it’s too much of an overstatement to say that bandwidth is going to be increasing, overall, in scope – and decreasing in price – even faster than microprocessors are in terms of power over the next 10 years … In the very short term, the only bottleneck is really into the hub.