We live in the Internet age. Everyone wants clicks. Clicks are what sells.
Beginning in the Clinton administration, there was, for nearly two decades, a broad bipartisan consensus that the best Internet policy was light-touch regulation - rules that promoted competition and kept the Internet 'unfettered by federal or state regulation.' Under this policy, a free and open Internet flourished.
The Internet has transformed the landscape of children's social lives, moving cliques from lunchrooms and lockers to live chats and online bulletin boards and intensifying their reach and power.
Although the Internet makes it seem as if you have a direct connection to the securities market, you don't. Lines may clog; systems may break; orders may back-up.
The Internet has introduced me to some of my closest friends.
The move to tax Internet sales, clothed as a 'fairness' issue, is the typical 'wolf-in-sheep's-clothing' ploy so often used by governments unwilling to cut expenditures to match revenues. It matters not whether its proponents have a 'D' or an 'R' after their name. It is a tax increase in either case.
Today, there are many, many ways to entertain people in one single videogame. And the Internet has made it so easy for people to ask for clues.
Do you remember when Fabio got hit in the face with a pigeon on the roller coaster, and it broke his nose? Sometimes I feel like I'm the pigeon, and the Internet is Fabio's face. Actually, I don't know if I'm the pigeon, or I'm Fabio's face. Depends on the day, I guess.
I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.
The fundamental issue is: In the world of the Internet, is there a place for a packager of services? Does the customer want to go surf the Net and go to every one of 50,000 Web sites? Or will people pay a reasonable amount for somebody to go out and preselect and package what they want? My guess is they will both coexist.
If someone offered me a free trip to the International Space Station, I would decline. I like Earth. I like the internet. I like Diet Coke. I have cats. I write about brave people - I'm not one of them.
I think the good thing about the Internet is to give something away and to sell something else. Get a business model like that because the old brick and mortar record stores are falling apart, and the big record companies are collapsing under their own weight.
The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
Media cycles end, but the Internet never forgets. This is a valuable lesson, especially for college students.
With the Internet, bands can come and go every five minutes and the music looks disposable.
As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has said that several foreign dignitaries personally spoke to him about creating a new Internet user fee to subsidize an international universal service fund at the expense of traditional end users.
StockX's live marketplace will harness the Internet's natural ability to facilitate a better way to transact certain segments of ecommerce. We are going to bring the kind of trading platform and visibility to tangible products that financial and commodities markets have used for decades.
Like many older D.C. organizations, Common Cause has had to come a long way both in its use of the Internet and its understanding of the great value of engaging people in a broader online dialogue.
Certainly, my advice is that communicating, lobbying, fundraising and engaging the public in policy and politics is far more exciting and inexpensive via the Internet. Old guard organizations like Common Cause had to evolve to embrace this new environment.
