(Originally a draft post for a longer series on “the first day of the 90s”)
I found this piece amusing and naive. “The Internet in the 90s” is something that will be revisited later, but for now, here’s a preview.
Dial a number and the video screen in your wall becomes a window into the place you are calling. You can see and converse with people on the other side, even slide documents through the window, via fax machine. All this could be possible once the country is wired with fiber-optic cable. But that will cost some $250 billion and won't happen for decades unless Washington decides it should be done sooner. If so, how? And who should pay?
These issues are difficult to sort out, in part because the demand for fiber-optic services is so hard to assess. HDTV may be a joy to behold, but not every household will want to buy a set at $2,000.
But the phone companies insist on selling content as the condition for building the networks, and that raises a serious question of public interest in free and fair access.
It is a bit amusing to see that the concern then was “whether people would get access”. How quaint.
Today the situation has flipped -- just as a former state of food scarcity has led to the prevalence of “junk food”, the information scarcity of a few decades ago has led to “junk content”, consumed at scale.