] The Internet has become a giant white elephant. Its
] technological capabilities are dazzling; its commercial
] realities are depressing. There is much to observe about the state of things in thinking about why this essay is wrong. I won't bother explaining why his over simplification of the intellectual property problem is misleading. Its well covered elsewhere. What I will note is that his analogy to automobiles is silly, but also instructive. Automobiles have been a part of our society for a hundred years. All previous forms of transportation have, for the most part, been elminiated, and the layout of our cities, in fact our whole planet, has been reorganized with the existence of automobiles in mind. Therefore, at this stage we could not hope to revert to steam locomotives, and carriages, without huge disruptions. The Internet, on the other hand, has been available commerically for around 8 years. Although already I feel like I couldn't live without it, we certainly haven't done any reorganizing of society to account for it it, and we haven't eliminated any of our older communications systems. So, yes, in general we could do away with it, much as we might have been able to do away with the automobile 8 years into its development. So his arguement is silly, but also illuminating. If you want to know what is going to happen over the next 50 years, consider what occured over the first 50 years of the automobile... Lack of innovation fueled Internet failure | 
