Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/clarinet/internetworld

Text File | 1994-09-11 | 14KB | 310 lines

            The Internet: What is it REALLY for?

   Paper Delivered at the Internet World Spring Conference
                        June 1, 1994
                        San Jose, CA




                       Brad Templeton
                ClariNet Communications Corp.
      4800 Stevens Creek Blvd. #206, San Jose, CA 95129
                      [e-mail]






Suddenly the internet is everywhere and you can get an
account on most of the major online services and tons of
small startup "on-ramps," dial in with your modem and access
some internet services.  But the internet is not another
online service or even an extension of one, so people aren't
getting the full picture.  How does the net go beyond being
just a big online service?





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Some people have suggested that the national debt could be
paid off if they only put a tax on people who use the phrase
_information superhighway_ these days.  Suddenly the
much-hyped phenomenon of "media convergence" is itself
converging with the network world's hype to produce a great
deal of talk, and some very unusual plans.

A large audience has just noticed the internet and its
surrounding communities, which comes as a surprise to those
who've been doing it for a decade or so.  The place we've
been living is has suddenly been "discovered" by the real
world -- with overtones on that word similar to those on
Columbus' "discovery" of the new world.

There are many camps promoting many visions of an
information superhighway, two of them quite large.  In the
first camp we have the cable companies.  It amuses me to see
people who can examine all this technology and think only
that they could now provide 500 TV channels.  From a
business standpoint, it is understandable, since everybody
knows that piping in movies and entertainment is a big
business and a seemingly safe bet.  But it's like horse-traders
discovering the internal combustion engine and salivating
over how quickly they'll be able to ship large numbers of
horses to where they are needed.

The other large camp has noticed the internet and the rest
of the online world, and dubbed it the information
superhighway.  I'll admit some guilt there -- I've used the
term to tell people what the internet is because it's an
easy phrase to use.  The most public members of that camp
are the online service providers -- big ones such as America
Online and medium ones like Netcom.

The online service industry is also pretty old, and dates
back to the first BBSs and online services in the late '70s.
That world pretty much ignored the networking world of the
ARPANET, USENET and the internet until 1992.  It was
academic and uncontrolled, it was competition and it was
perceived as being free.  It wasn't free, somebody else was
paying for it, but it was actually remarkably cheap per user
in terms of what it delivered.  Particularly since those
online services worked at 2400 bps or even less.

Now that these services are positioning themselves as access
portals to the internet, they're making a mistake in
long-term thinking.  While the value of the bridge they are
providing is undeniable, it is a short term value.  The
error is to think of the internet as a big online service,
or as the extension of one.

The internet is of course very simple.  All it really does
is provide point to point communications for computers on
top of a packet switched network.  What people see, though,
is the applications that people have put on top of this.

The thing that makes the internet different is that it
provides permanent virtual connectivity.  It gives you the
illusion that something far away is on the computer that's
on your desk.  Because the connection is (when done
properly) permanent the wall between "on your computer" and
"on somebody else's computer" breaks down.  In many cases
the connectivity doesn't have to be fast, but for many of
the exciting cases it is.

Indeed, permanent connectivity isn't everything.  A lot of
interesting things happen with plain old modems and BBSs and
USENET.  But the internet can do all those things as well or
better, and it can do more.

Sun Microsystems has an off-and-on slogan that they use:
"The network is the computer."  I think it's an excellent
slogan.  People used to think of processors as computers.
When micros came, we learned to think of the hard disk as
the real identify of a computer -- if you moved a hard disk
from one machine to another, the new machine became the old
one.

Sun's slogan really refers to the local area network, and
many people have already reached that state in their
computer use.  They feel that their computer, even if it has
its own hard disk, seems crippled if it is ever taken off
the LAN.  Its identity comes from the LAN its on.

The internet goes one step further, and changes your sense
of what your computer is to be "the worldwide network."  Once
your computer is on the internet -- really on it -- suddenly
it feels crippled when it is disconnected.  Soon people may
feel disconnected computers are almost unusable, which is
part of what drives the wireless networking explosion.

When the connection is permanent, things can happen without
your intervention.  On the online services, you use a
computer like any other.  You issue commands and things
happen.  You may interact with other users, which is a step
up, but it's still a "session," with your active
involvement.

But once you have a permanent hookup, things happen even
when you aren't there.  Information comes to you -- you
don't have to go to it.  And if you have a fast, permanent
connection, the information doesn't even have to come to
you, it merely needs to knock and say, "I'm out here, and
you'll see me the moment you ask for me."

This means our computers can do more than just execute our
commands when we sit in front of them.  They can be out in
the world as our agents and butlers.

It also means that we get to interact at an equal footing.
To be on the internet is not just the ability to use it and
browse it, but the ability to have information on your
computer available to other people as though it is on their
computer.  And while you can do this by buying space on an
online service, it's not the same -- not as dynamic -- as
having the information on your own machine, one you can
change instantly, as you desire.

People have already learned the immense difference from
E-mail that's on the computer on your desk and E-mail on a
dial-up online service.  E-mail on your desk comes to you,
it's like home delivery as opposed to a P.O.  box.  When you
are working on the E-mail you have full access to everything
you're used to on your own computer.  If it's important it
can beep at you in your home.  People have conversations
with live E-mail, and in fact some times it even goes too
fast, because people come to expect a level of instant
response that's too intrusive if you try to keep it up all
the time.

A real internet connection ups the ante like this for all
applications.  Now let's look at what this means for a
number of key areas and applications.

Publishing:  Even with all the hype the revolution in
publishing is going to surpass most people's expectations.
Publishing today is actually a grossly inefficient industry,
with most books overproduced and pulped, and forests denuded
in the quest for paper.  The economies of E-publishing are
so strong that any love we have for the feel, smell and look
of paper books will be eventually overwhelmed.  It's the
same for news, but on top of it all the computer beats paper
for speed hands-down.

But people don't realize that with all the economies of
scale gone from publishing, as well as the barriers to
entry, a brave new world will emerge.  While publishing is
already an industry of publicity and editing, it will become
exclusively that.  Overnight fame will become commonplace,
and people may have to push hard for 15 minutes of it.
People won't read a lot more than they do today, but they'll
read a lot of different material.

News:  Journalists will still be important.  As we've
demonstrated at ClariNet, people will pay for quality in
what they read on the net.  But the control of information
by the media will be gone.  It will be too easy for small
media, and even ordinary people, to push hidden stories out
to the world.  More to the point, people will expect their
big media to give them hypertext pointers to the small
media, so that when they want to see the other side of a
story, or read other viewpoints, they can.  If the big media
won't give that to them, they'll subscribe to people who
just make pointers to both the big and small media.

News is a great application for the internet today, but
actually it's also well suited to broadcast.  The result
will actually be a hybrid, with popular material broadcast
in digital form to be efficient, supplemented by pointers
over the net to less popular material.

Advertising:  The newspapers are afraid the Bells will crush
them by taking away the lucrative classified advertising
market.  There's bad news for both of them.  Classified
advertising in the network world is *trivial* to do, and it
costs almost nothing.  In fact, you can do basic classified
advertising on the net for free right now, and while it's
not organized, the cost of organizing it is nothing if you
work it out per reader.  Sure, classifieds will be a big
thing, but a tiny portion of the big money pie they are
today.  Nobody is going to "win" the classified market share
battle.  Classified ads will be something network providers
throw in for free, to make their service more attractive.

Display advertising is another story.  It's going to change
a lot too, but most people don't realize how entrenched it
is, how much we depend on it subsidizing our art, entertainment
and information.  There's a huge inertia to defeat there.  I
know, I run an advertising-free electronic newspaper.

Libraries:  How can you have a free public electronic
lending library down the electronic street from the
electronic bookstore?  You can't if they both want to carry
the same books.  Libraries will exist to hold the stuff that
isn't in electronic form or doesn't readily map to it, but
they make no sense for stuff that's out for sale on the net.
There are answers, however, including flat rate access to
information, with royalties divided up to authors according
to popularity, and endowments to pay these fees for the
poor.

The Web:  Hypertext is finally coming to life, decades after
Ted Nelson dreamed about it.  Something like the Web is
going to grow and flourish, but looking at the Internet as
though it is the Web and Mosaic is wrong.  The Web isn't
really interactive.  Most people don't contribute back to
it, and there's no sense of community to it.  If you don't
look at netnews, mailing lists or even IRC, you're missing
out on the community side of the internet, and that's the
biggest part of it.  The real purpose of computer networks,
in the end, is for people to communicate with people.

Netnews:  Amazingly, it still follows pretty much the
patterns set for it in 1981, which is both a credit to the
design, but one of the remarkably few failings of its
anarchic structure.  A decade is ancient.  The network world
changes more in a long lunch hour than many industries
change in a century.  The net needs a way to grow and change
or even more people will get bored with it.

The little guy:  The victor in all this.  Particularly when
it comes to marketing.  Suddenly the tiny startup
manufacturer can be on an even footing in reaching the
customer when it comes to browsing on the net.  Some areas
will allow advertising, and some won't, but many people will
deliberately browse the areas that don't, where IBM will be
just another entry of the same size as Joe's Computers.

Paperwork:  The paperless office never really worked because
you couldn't send your non-paper out of your own computer.
When your own computer is mapped onto the worldwide network,
suddenly this becomes possible.  In my own office I don't
let my staff give me paper, but what comes in from outside
is still enough to drown you.  Finally we can get rid of
that.  Perhaps this is what the internet is truly for?

Politics:  The first twinges of this haven't required the
permanent connectivity of the net, but the community that's
formed is a powerful one.  Indeed, the government has yet to
defeat it and put in a law that is widely disliked.

But the network world has the capacity to change the face of
politics completely.  While the poor majority will not be on
the net for some time to come, soon the educated will all be
on it all the time.  Political secrets will become harder to
hide, and political action easier to organize.  E-mailing
your opinion to your government will be so easy that
politicians will eventually learn to discount it.

However, a far broader change is possible.  As we start
conducting all of our commerce over the net, we'll be able
to control our commerce with software, and engage in
political action with every commercial and even social
transaction we make.  This is beyond the scope of this
discussion, but imagine for a moment that your computer
might, before you make any purchase, query GreenPeace's
server to check on the environmental rating of the company
you're dealing with.  What if you did that even before
browsing the catalogs.  Today boycotts are sometimes
effective, but mostly not strong enough to affect large
entities.  The ability to have programs affect all your
transactions allows them to be automatic, and will put vast
power into the hands of those who are asked for political
advice.  The consequences could be staggering, both for good
and for bad.

The truth is that we haven't yet seen what the net is really
for.  It's going to change the world even more than the
purveyors of net hype imagine.  You may mistake it for
another online service today, but you won't for long.