There is not going to be an Internet in the year 2010, there will merely be a Net, and this Net will be provided most likely from the telephone company or something like that. And all kinds of things will plug into it for all kinds of different purposes.
The computer hucksters have promoted a digital world which will not come to pass.
We’re expecting a boom in content providers who are starting to say, “People are on the Net. Let’s put stuff up and make money at it.” But this legislation scares them. They’re saying, “I could go to jail if someone thinks it’s indecent and I don’t even know what words I’m allowed to use.”
There has been a general shortage of expertise in networking. And we have to expect our sites to be less knowledgable in the future. So either the network breaks, or we make our system more robust.
I hope that the concept of the Web as an information space independent of hardware type and location will continue to exist … I hope we will be smart enough to allow this evolution and never have to suddenly stop, put a “7” in front of all the URIs, and call it something else.
The discourse in these computer-mediated forums exhibits many qualities of an oral culture. The existence of this text-based orality may imply that discourse need not be based upon sound in order to have oral characteristics. Rather … oral characteristics grow out of computer-mediated communication which gives participants greater independence over time and space than paper-based text communication … Just as the earlier technologies (the Greek alphabet, the printing press) changed the way people communicated and thought, so, too, does CMC.
The interesting thing is that while on the one hand I would like a single-user interface metaphor for all these things, on the other hand one sees that at the lower levels of NNTTP, SMTP and HTTP the protocols also will grow to look more like others, as HTTP uses caching to distribute much-read documents in a self-organizing way which if taken to the limit becomes the flooding of NNTP. So the boundaries will I suspect disappear at all levels.
If it’s good people, people will want to buy it, and money is the way they vote on what they want. I believe that system is the best one we have, so if it’s right, sure people are going to make money. People will make money building software, selling information, and more importantly doing all kinds of “real” business which happens to work much better because the Web is there to make their work easier.
The emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements of the digital era will profoundly affect our access to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse, the forms of cultural activity, the enaction of power, and the experiences that give shape and texture to our daily routines.
Another market which could use the next-generation IP is device control. This consists of the control of everyday devices such as lighting equipment, heating and cooling equipment, motors, and other types of equipment which are currently controlled via analog switches and in aggregate consume considerable amounts of electrical power. The size of this market is enormous and requires solutions which are simple, robust, easy to use, and very low cost.