Drawing a comparison from development of a human infant - human race has just commenced to develop its neural system.

The Internet fulfils all functions of Nervous System in body and is, both functionally and structurally, pretty similar. It is decentralized, redundant (each part can serve as functional backup in case of malfunction). It hosts information which is accessible through various paths, it contains a memory function, it is multimodal (multimedia - textual, visual, audio and animation).

I believe that comparison is not superficial and that studying functions of brain (from infancy to adulthood) is likely to shed light on future of Net itself. The Net - exactly like nervous system - provides pathways for transport of goods and services - but also of memes and information, their processing, modeling, and integration.

A. The Collective Computer

Carrying metaphor of "a collective brain" further, we would expect processing of information to take place on Internet, rather than inside end-user’s hardware (the same way that information is processed in brain, not in eyes). Desktops will receive results and communicate with Net to receive additional clarifications and instructions and to convey information gathered from their environment (mostly, from user).

Put differently:

In future, servers will contain not only information (as they do today) - but also software applications. The user of an application will not be forced to buy it. He will not be driven into hardware-related expenditures to accommodate ever growing size of applications. He will not find himself wasting his scarce memory and computing resources on passive storage. Instead, he will use a browser to call a central computer. This computer will contain needed software, broken to its elements (=applets, small applications). Anytime user wishes to use one of functions of application, he will siphon it off central computer. When finished - he will "return" it. Processing speeds and response times will be such that user will not feel at all that he is not interacting with his own software (the question of ownership will be very blurred). This technology is available and it provoked a heated debated about future shape of computing industry as a whole (desktops - really power packs - or network computers, a little more than dumb terminals). Access to online applications are already offered to corporate users by ASPs (Application Service Providers).

In last few years, scientists have harnessed combined power of online PC's to perform astounding feats of distributed parallel processing. Millions of PCs connected to net co-process signals from outer space, meteorological data, and solve complex equations. This is a prime example of a collective brain in action.

B. The Intranet - a Logical Extension of Collective Computer

LANs (Local Area Networks) are no longer a rarity in corporate offices. WANs (wide Area Networks) are used to connect geographically dispersed organs of same legal entity (branches of a bank, daughter companies of a conglomerate, a sales force). Many LANs and WANs are going wireless.

The wireless intranet/extranet and LANs are wave of future. They will gradually eliminate their fixed line counterparts. The Internet offers equal, platform-independent, location-independent and time of day - independent access to corporate memory and nervous system. Sophisticated firewall security applications protect privacy and confidentiality of intranet from all but most determined and savvy crackers.

The Intranet is an inter-organizational communication network, constructed on platform of Internet and it, therefore, enjoys all its advantages. The extranet is open to clients and suppliers as well.

The company's server can be accessed by anyone authorized, from anywhere, at any time (with local - rather than international - communication costs). The user can leave messages (internal e-mail or v-mail), access information - proprietary or public - from it, and participate in "virtual teamwork" (see next chapter).

The development of measures to safeguard server routed inter-organizational communication (firewalls) is solution to one of two obstacles to institutionalization of Intranets. The second problem is limited bandwidth which does not permit efficient transfer of audio (not to mention video).

It is difficult to conduct video conferencing through Internet. Even voices of discussants who use internet phones (IP telephony) come out (though very slightly) distorted.

All this did not prevent 95% of Fortune 1000 from installing intranet. 82% of rest intend to install one by end of this year. Medium to big size American firms have 50-100 intranet terminals per every internet one.

One of greatest advantages of intranet is ability to transfer documents between various parts of an organization. Consider Visa: it pushed 2 million documents per day internally in 1996.

An organization equipped with an intranet can (while protected by firewalls) give its clients or suppliers access to non-classified correspondence, or inventory systems. Many B2B exchanges and industry-specific purchasing management systems are based on extranets.

C. The Transport of Information - Mail and Chat

The Internet (its e-mail function) is eroding traditional mail. 90% of customers with on-line access use e-mail from time to time and 60% work with it regularly. More than 2 billion messages traverse internet daily.

E-mail applications are available as freeware and are included in all browsers. Thus, Internet has completely assimilated what used to be a separate service, to extent that many people make mistake of thinking that e-mail is a feature of Internet.

The internet will do to phone calls what it has done to mail. Already there are applications (Intel's, Vocaltec's, Net2Phone) which enable user to conduct a phone conversation through his computer. The voice quality has improved. The discussants can cut into each others words, argue and listen to tonal nuances. Today, parties (two or more) engaging in conversation must possess same software and same (computer) hardware. In very near future, computer-to-regular phone applications will eliminate this requirement. And, again, simultaneous multi-modality: user can talk over phone, see his party, send e-mail, receive messages and transfer documents - without obstructing flow of conversation.

Internet news are advantaged. They are frequently and dynamically updated (unlike static print news) and are always accessible (similar to print news), immediate and fresh.

The future will witness a form of interactive news. A special "corner" in news Web site will accommodate "breaking news" posted by members of the public (or corporate press releases). This will provide readers with a glimpse into making of news, raw material news are made of. The same technology will be applied to interactive TVs. Content will be downloaded from internet and displayed as an overlay on TV screen or in a box in it. The contents downloaded will be directly connected to TV programming. Thus, biography and track record of a football player will be displayed during a football match and history of a country when it gets news coverage.

4. Terra Internetica - Internet, an Unknown Continent

Laymen and experts alike talk about "sites" and "advertising space". Yet, Internet was never compared to a new continent whose surface is infinite.

The Internet has its own real estate developers and construction companies. The real life equivalents derive their profits from scarcity of resource that they exploit - Internet counterparts derive their profits from tenants (content producers and distributors, e-tailers, and others).

Entrepreneurs bought "Internet Space" (pages, domain names, portals) and leveraged their acquisition commercially by:

Renting space out; Constructing infrastructure on their property and selling it; Providing an intelligent gateway, entry point (portal) to rest of internet; Selling advertising space which subsidizes tenants (Yahoo!-Geocities, Tripod and others); Cybersquatting (purchasing specific domain names identical to brand names in "real" world) and then selling domain name to an interested party. Internet Space can be easily purchased or created. The investment is low and getting lower with introduction of competition in field of domain registration services and increase in number of top domains.

Then, infrastructure can be erected - for a shopping mall, for free home pages, for a portal, or for another purpose. It is precisely this infrastructure that developer can later sell, lease, franchise, or rent out.

But this real estate bubble was culmination of a long and tortuous process.

At beginning, only members of fringes and avant-garde (inventors, risk assuming entrepreneurs, gamblers) invest in a new invention. No one knows to say what are optimal uses of invention (in other words, what is its future). Many - mostly members of scientific and business elites - argue that there is no real need for invention and that it substitutes a new and untried way for old and tried modes of doing same things (so why assume risk of investing in unknown and untried?).

Moreover, these criticisms are usually well-founded.

To start with, there is, indeed, no need for new medium. A new medium invents itself - and need for it. It also generates its own market to satisfy this newly found need.

Two prime examples of this self-recursive process are personal computer and compact disc.

When PC was invented, its uses were completely unclear. Its performance was lacking, its abilities limited, it was unbearably user unfriendly. It suffered from faulty design, was absent any user comfort and ease of use and required considerable professional knowledge to operate. The worst part was that this knowledge was exclusive to new invention (not portable). It reduced labour mobility and limited one's professional horizons. There were many gripes among workers assigned to tame new beast. Managers regarded it at best as a nuisance.