An advisory committee of 30 people will help the administration ‘to be very serious about the most important issues … The NII is part of a revolution changing how we work, live, play and will proceed in starts and fits like the early American new frontiers.
The biggest long-range problem is how the Internet will be managed. Before, it was sort of an insiders’ club and there was no formal structure. The effort now is to try to promote the Internet Society (a nonprofit organization formed this January) as an overall umbrella.
High-capacity uses such as HDTV are not going to happen … [I] hope bandwidth will get cheaper … the problems are going to be in the periphery of uses.
It is confusing, and information overload is a major problem. There is no central index to easily find information, receiving graphic images is frustratingly slow and there is a serious lack of security. Still those are kinks that will be solved as the technology evolves,
There are lots of potential negatives for individuals. It’s going to mean wrenching changes, I think. The technology itself: no negatives. The impact on people: it depends. It’s going to continue to change the way the work force is put together, the activities that people undertake, the amount of change people have to be undergoing to stay current. It’s going to challenge the education system in order to keep up. It’s going to have a whole series of impacts like that. The sheer rate of change, assuming it continues to increase, is going to start to get pretty severe.
The future’s on both sides [client & server] because the client needs to have the capability to display information and to make it useful.
There are not a lot of software applications able to have that many users, and it just happened so quickly. The downside is that it could vanish overnight. You have to keep up.
There’ll be a bond between technology and academia.
You should have broadband data going into everyone’s home, and you should have computing devices everywhere doing interesting things. And when that happened there could be a very large new part of the software industry to address that.
The NREN is at all odds the most important and lucrative marketplace of the 21st century.