Word: infobahn
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...alone a modem, "Net TV" would seem to make perfect sense. After all, nearly everybody in America has a TV and a telephone, and many are presumably curious to learn what the World Wide Web is all about. If they could use their existing sets to access the Infobahn from the comfort of their La-Z-Boys, the Web might finally become the mass medium its promoters have been promising all along...
MICHAEL KRANTZ has been fascinated by new media since the dawn of what he calls "the age of infobahn hype." He's a self-confessed recovering Doom II addict who has written about everything from Nintendo to nanotechnology; this week he covers Time Warner's all but completed acquisition of Turner Broadcasting. Before joining TIME, Krantz was a senior editor at Mediaweek and an indefatigable free-lancer (his work appeared in such magazines as New York, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker). He is also that lucky man who is happy in his job. "My field," he says...
Clark, however, moved on. By 1994 the desktop generation was yielding to the networked, interactive generation. But while his peers were debating how to build the Infobahn, Clark decided it already existed. He'd met Marc Andreessen, who as an undergraduate programmer had helped create the then obscure browsing software Mosaic, which made it easy to navigate the World Wide Web. Navigating the infant Web, which transforms the Internet's isolated, text-based sites into one vast, hyperlinked, multimedia-capable network, got Clark thinking--and acting. He and Andreessen founded Mosaic Communications (soon renamed Netscape) and built a business around...
Once again, the jackboots of the Industrial Era can be heard stomping cluelessly around the Infobahn. In fact, the Germans did almost nothing to stanch the flow of sexual materials. The newsgroups that CompuServe removed are still active on millions of computers worldwide. CompuServe subscribers in Bavaria or anywhere else can simply switch to a less timid online service and re-enter the discussion. As Internet pioneer John Gilmore once said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around...
...debate over how to handle the problem pits the freewheeling techno- cowboys of the computer and telecommunications industries against traditional advocates for the poor. The computer and telecommunications industries proclaim a paramount faith in market forces, at least partly because they fear eventual government regulation of access to the infobahn. As they see it, the forces of competition and the marketplace will drive the prices of equipment and online services downward and make both increasingly available to the less affluent...