This is a report published by the European Parliament after the burst of the late 1990s economic bubble. Included below are excerpts from the preface and executive summary.

If market take-up is a general problem for the development of the Information Society, the specific reasons and bottlenecks need to be addressed. ... The study concentrates on access, standards, privacy, and the convergence of finance and communications networks and systems.

Access problems have been at the root of regulatory policy since the early days ... The process of market liberalisation is a continuous one, and it is difficult to dispel the impression that no sooner is one bottleneck solved than another appears. The report therefore sets about trying to discover where bottlenecks to competition are likely to occur as new economy services develop beyond their basic levels.

In cases where the take-up of electronic business has been slower than expected, one of the major reasons has been the lack of trust and confidence that citizens have ...

Concerns regarding privacy are, according to this study at least, well-founded. The chapter on privacy is frankly disturbing, and policy measures will be needed to deal with emerging and future threats.

In tomorrow's Information Society, an increasingly wide range of human characteristics will find themselves reflected in some kind of electronic equivalent. A major hypothesis of this study is that the increasing weight of the electronic expression of those characteristics will lead to new indicators of privacy. Today's determinants of privacy will be replaced by tomorrow's virtual characteristics expressed in terms of a host of personal data. Just as information technology transformed business processes, and its partnership with communications technologies is now transforming commercial processes, the treatment of personal information is undergoing similar radical change and transformation under the influence of these same technologies.