When will the tollbooths on the infobahn appear? My brother-in-law thinks it’s television, and that that’s how it will develop. I still think we need some pay-per-view channels, or some of us will have no means of “trading bits for pieces”… Fifty quatleus on the Earthling. What do you give away? Something cheap, one would think…
However, everything in the realm of bits is essentially expensive to develop, and very cheap to “produce” and disseminate. The marginal cost of additional copies is low, like seats on an airplane, or in a movie theatre, or viewers of a television broadcast…
Will netcasting channels be artificially made to be a precious resource? Certainly there are people who’d benefit from this.
There is some merit in the broadcasting analogy here… The movie studios and television networks have been in the business of charging for information for a long time…
We really will need verifiable identities on the net soon. People do know this… Dertzusos recognized on C-SPAN that anonymity is optional, if that’s the way we want it…
Posted by foote at May 4, 1997 07:01 PM