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.