Raise and Fall of the Internet

It’s clear that the internet as we know today it is going to disappear:

  • Science, where it all started from, asks for more bandwidth and isolation;
  • E-commerce failing - look at that world wide -
  • Vulnerable : hackers able to take out the Net whenever they want;
  • Viruses, spread thru the internet, disabling/slowing down our productivity;
  • Popular sites have to charge fees, and making them obsolete;
  • Terrorists using the Net for easy communications;
  • As a countermeasure, intelligence services have to tune in and need to know what I am saying;
  • Parents worry about anarchy, nihilism and immorality of the net.

So what the opinion here: right or wrong ?

Right or wrong what? That change is inevitable or that the reasons you list are adequate to explain the continuing development of electronic communications?

Most of the reasons you list are ridiculous. Many people are now using the internet to pay the bills (my mom does.) And if hackers could take it down when they wanted, it would already be gone. As for terrorist communication, that goes the same for phones. Should we get rid of those because terrorists could use them? Also, many people are willing to pay fees for the exactly the reason the sites are popular and still are, people like to use them! And most viruses can be taken care of relatively quickly, plus there are lots of other things that slow down productivity outside the internet. On the whole, the internet probably makes things more efficient. And finally, parents should be worried more about the internet, i think drugs are a bigger problem. Wouldn’t you agree?

For the purposes of certain types of computing collaboration; the original use of the Internet for communication amoung academics and researchers still exists.

Gold rush e-commerce has failed. We haven’t seen real e-commerce yet, though Amazon looks like it might be a good start.

Just because the dot-com bubble has burst doesn’t mean the Internet isn’t a useful commercial medium. Dell is proof of that.

This is speculation. Vandals can make a downtown pretty ugly; the city still stands, and can be cleaned up.

I’ve never caught a virus. Not once. 140 users at my workplace have spread less than five in three years, in a difficult-to-secure Windows environment.

Users and system administrators learn and fix things. Just because things aren’t perfect doesn’t mean they’re useless.

Some subscription sites work (porn sites, for example), some don’t. There’s still lots of free, good content on the web, including professional media outlets, with no plans to charge money on the horizon (e.g., New York Times, Slate, LA Times).

So what? They use the roads, the telephones, the mail service. Maybe somethings have to change, maybe not, but the point remains that the commons is available to all to use or abuse. The Internet is just another commons.

Maybe, maybe not. The jury’s still out on the legality and the viability of the various government plans to tap Internet communications.

So what? Parents worried about Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, movies, video games, and other bad influences. Sometimes accomodations are made, sometimes not.

The Internet may not remain the idyllic utopia that teenage libertarian geeks imagine (if it ever was). That’s not even close to a threat to the existence of the Internet.

The Internet will mature. The fad phase is over, the wannabe’s and me-too’s have fallen. Unless terrorism strikes deeply (starts costing the sponsors of the actual backbone), business will continue to seek ways to exploit the Internet and consumers will come to their sites. The Internet just won’t be the Alpha/Omega that the zealouts tried to make us believe it would.