In the process of scaling, is there a cusp, a threshold at which the Net will break down and have to be rebuilt? I think the Net is scaling very well. Because of the way it was designed, I don’t think it will come to its knees and crash. I see it as very organic in the way it’s capable of living and reproducing itself.
[By 2000] I expect [the Internet] to become the backbone for electronic commerce. I expect it to begin to carry voice and video, and in the process to cause a big ruckus about unfair competition for the common carriers. Governments will want to regulate it. There will be a lot of legal turmoil about privacy, free speech, import-export law, etc. The culture will change to be less of a frontier justice to more of an organized, businesslike world. Usage pricing will begin. Information won’t be free anymore; everything will cost.
[The technological advancements that will have the biggest impact on business, and the home by 2000 will be,] Radical scenario [for business]: an all-pervasive ATM network that will include an interface to radio and various cable networks. Home: Settop computers that link to TV sets and get the noncomputer people linked for communication, education, games, etc., whether they want it or not. This will move us from a current “plug-and-pray” computer to one that can order and install its own software and can be maintained remotely.
[The expected advancements that will be the biggest disappointments by 2000 will be] object-oriented programming – no significant change in the way software is built or the industry is organized; agents that do useful things; collaboration technology – people will realize it’s nothing more than video in a window.
[The biggest technological surprise to come by 2000 will be] some new digital storage device that enables thousands of gigabytes to be put into a cigarette-box-sized case.
Interactivity will blur the line between users and providers.
It’s going to reach the same amount of people that the current mass media reach. But it has totally different properties than any of the previous mass media. The big impact that the Net’s going to have on culture in general is that it will allow it to become a lot more fragmented … I think that’s positive. It increases choice and diversity. It means that you can go find the stuff that you really think is interesting as opposed to the stuff that you’re forced to be spoon-fed because there’s nothing else out there.
[By the end of 1995] dynamic content starts to appear. E-mail and discussion groups become more tightly integrated with the Web … It’s a lot easier for people to create and publish content with graphical tools. And … it’s going to get a lot easier for people to charge for information or to charge for buying and selling things.
The big shift that the Internet effects is [that] it allows niches or communities of interest around specific topics to be able to really thrive, down to a huge degree of specialization that hasn’t been possible before.
The percentage of users who need secure private communications will be a relatively small part of a huge volume of traffic. We’ll see enormous growth in unmanaged services. For example, consider a Web server as a catalog: There’s no need for security except when the customer is buying. You can’t steal what’s being given away, and most of the information in the world is like that. For most services, you won’t need a private network to guarantee quality.