Internet Quotes
A startlingly bad prediction by a Nobel-prize winning economist particularly given it was stated in 1998 rather than a much earlier date when the potential of the Internet wasn’t already apparent. Ironically, the quote is from a Red Herring article he wrote titled “Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong” in which he asserts that most economists predictions are wrong because they overestimate the impact of future technologies. This quote is part of a longer, equally incorrect quote: “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” See related quotes.
A misguided prediction. If you are going to be wrong, go big and say it with confidence.
Sometimes found as a larger quote: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
Misquoted. In a March 9, 1999 interview on CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked the candidate Gore to describe what distinguished him from his Democratic challenger, New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. In part, he said: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” It was clumsy wording which was subsequently construed as Gore claiming to have invented the Internet, initially popularized by Declan McCullagh, a libertarian writer, in a post to Wired.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Tinker referred to the Supreme Court Case of Tinker v. Des Moines where the court ruled that school children had Constitutional rights as well as adults. It was not possible to have a blocking system that would keep “improper” or “indecent” internet sites from library or school computers. Even if it could, the appropriate material for a 17 year old to see and a 5 year old were very different. The blocking software never worked well. Computer sophisticated students would pride themselves by showing how they could evade the blocking software, and at the same time teen age girls would have health sites blocked because they showed how to do breast self-examinations.
At the time, the few private companies that provided American Internet service did not want to increase the bandwidth speeds to homes. Those businesses who needed more bandwidth paid dearly for it, but consumers could not afford those rates. With fiber optics, it cost no more to provide higher bandwidth than lower. But then the Internet providers would not be able to make the huge profit margins on the corporate accounts. In much of Europe, however, the Government rules and regulations required a higher standard of performance for the public in general. In the US, the Government did not want to regulate the performance standards of the private sector with respect to the Internet. Clinton argued that the problem should be solved by the private sector, but if they could or did not, he argued that government should set the rules to solve the problem. The software and hardware companies were driving American digital technology forward, but the few communications company were working to maintain the status quo on bandwidth.
