On Dec 28, 1995 23:30:19, 'tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)' wrote:
I see a positive longterm trend toward people connecting through smaller, more local services.
Quite correct. Not only does the internet radically change (at least perceptions) of space and time, it also is producing serious disequilibriums of scale in economics. Economy of scale states that until a farily high limit is reached, bigger enterprises tend to produce goods that are less expensive than those produced by smaller enterprises. Specialized handicraft production aside, the goods produced in larger enterprises also tend to be of higher quality. The disequilibrium here began with the development of the microprocessor as we see from the shift to the old centralized IBM iron to the microcomputers we're using today. Ditto certain aspects of network switching. Ditto DES moved from centralized hardware to decentralized software. We're seeing a growing dystopian world where national entities and non-governmental organizations all seek to enforce their particular cultural/political/economic/etc. biases on the global internet. I believe this process will continue for some period of time. At the same time we may (and I think likely will) see aspects of the net broken down into widely geographically separated locations that simultaneously have no more effect on end users than the floor at the central library on which the book we want resides. E.G. we'll use Denmark to get "alt.sex.granny.gum-jobs," ftp to Singapore for "/warez/microsoft/win99/hack/" and to the Turcos Islands for "data.finance.internal.morgan." We'll have all three open and on our monitor at the same time, passed through an second-level ISP in some small country that decides there's money in switching and will no more regulate data throughput than they would try to hold hotel keepers responsible for the content of the phone calls made by their tenants. --tallpaul