Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Was Negroponte Wrong in 1995?
Mr. Negroponte argued that less was more and that having infinite abilities could be a bad thing. I'm not so sure he was right. Humans are terrible at predicting the future, so it makes since that he blew it. He talked about charging for fees, but its plausible that he could have never imagined the extent that Internet service providers want to do this. Now net neutrality has become such a complex and salient issue that it dominates many discussions of the internet's future. With new economic models emerging frequently old "bits" are being eliminated. As more stuff goes from the physical realm to the online realm more bandwidth is going to be necessary. Now companies are going to try to make money off of stuff that used to be free or in non-digital form. Like it cost much to put stuff in digital form? Lets think about this - the only cost is to put this stuff in a digital format. And as file sizes get smaller and can move faster it makes sense that Internet companies want to slow files down or make them bigger so they can get more money. If fiber optics is infinite then we shouldn't just keep it small for hecks sake, if we do we are going to pay significant unnecessary fees.
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