2.15 Internet Prospects

To those who started when ecommerce was in its infancy, the Internet has changed beyond recognition. Most shopping carts work first time, and there is none of the search for software add-ons, the frustration with unhelpful call centers or the battle with incomprehensible manuals. Where the company cannot help with its products there commonly exists a support group, or, as a last resort, Internet searches that find others who have faced and solved exactly the same problem. The Internet is a community, and a community which is growing all the time with more useful sites and portable hardware. But however rapidly the Internet has developed and become part of our lives, {1} it has the potential to change them much further yet. {2}

Dangers

The Internet poses obvious dangers. Online commercial transactions increase the chances of fraud, already considerable, and extend the surveillance powers of the state, {3} commercial and criminal elements. Ready access to information allows immature, unbalanced or vulnerable minds to be exposed to deeply unsocial content, with catastrophic consequences to individual and public safety. {4} {5} Material posted to the Internet is commonly copied round the world in minutes, and what is released is not readily refuted or contained. Indeed, the ease with which material can be cut and pasted may bypass the critical faculty altogether, leaving students unable to summarize arguments effectively, form an independent judgment, or even develop the brain processes essential to adult behavior. {6} Intellectual property is increasingly under attack, and so may be any educational establishment or profession that treats knowledge as a private holding. {7}

Education is ideally placed to benefit from Internet technologies, but many schools in Africa and elsewhere lack a single computer. Business to business Internet technologies have immensely improved manufacturing efficiencies, but have also shut out third parties and placed smaller companies at a grave disadvantage. Technology may indeed create unemployment. {43} Citizens in advanced democracies now have immediate access to their government statements, but many governments have retreated from transparency by invoking state security that only serves to increase voter suspicions and cover up incompetence and the occasional wrongdoing. Finally, there is the dilution of fact as the billions of pages that now make up the world wide web threaten to overwhelm readers with an ever-increasing but difficult-to-assess flood of opinion in all shades of purpose, depth and reliability.

More controversial is the loss of privacy, and the ability of government intelligence to not only access all confidential information but add to, distort or permanently remove it: bank accounts, company information, friendly government strategies. Any digital representation can now be altered without redress, as it is illegal to divulge such 'investigations'. Oversight is perfunctory, and proposed changes largely window dressing. {44}

Collective Intelligence

Though governments often seek to legislate, control and monopolize, {8} the open nature of information on the Internet offers models {9} which may help to offset the increasingly centralized, money-based and sometimes dysfunctional systems of government by which even western democracies operate. The gain is not simply more democratic institutions, but more prosperous societies, with more people contributing to and benefiting from pooled resources. Such digital societies can collaborate better, make more effective teams, and encourage democracy, self-governance, accountable policies, true-cost accounting, and the ethical use of open-source material. Perfectly feasible, for example, are sites where citizens receive independent, weekly updates on matters of public concern (security, armament sales, military operations, clean water developments, bank holdings, etc.), access distance learning material and digital libraries, enjoy a one-to-many conversation with a recognized expert, and find links to impending legislation, conferences and related activist sites. {10} Collective intelligence, far from being a digital mob-rule, or the regimentation of thought behind political manifestos, becomes the cooperation of people who have common experiences, needs and aspirations. Aggregated estimates (like the market) are often surprisingly close to the truth. {11}

Many countries encourage online filing of tax returns, and the use of the Internet for referendums, voting and greater empowerment of the citizen has been contemplated. Though their use is growing {12} electronic voting machines currently suffer from security problems, {13} which online use would likely exacerbate.

Collaborative Efforts

The Internet was always ideally placed for collaborative efforts, {18} but the new social media and other platforms have made online communities much easier to create. Such sites now cover the spectrum, from those like Movellas catering for the 'common reader' to those like AncientLives, which cater for specialists. Indeed there exist sites for most needs, and probably for those not visualized before. {41} Social media has become an important enabling medium for social protest, from Teheran {36} to Occupy Wall Street. {37}

Humanitarian Concerns

Farming information, extended broad-band access and smart phones have the power to relieve the poverty that blights the existence of two thirds of the world's population. {2} Subsistence agriculture can be replaced by biotechnologies that improve crop yields, reduce water, seed and fertilization costs, and minimize dangers from pests, diseases and industrial poisons. Women can be more empowered, and corruption eased as government officials find their salaries improve as farming itself becomes more profitable.

Health

Medicine is changing. For a decade or more, Internet technologies have allowed radiologic images to be distributed throughout a hospital and beyond, {26} but similar technologies now allow the continuous monitoring of the human body in the way that racing car performance is monitored and simulated. {31} eHealth has become a rapidly expanding field, {32} and more physicians are using the Internet to research treatments and further their employment opportunities. {33}

eCommerce

eCommerce is here to stay. Overall US ecommerce revenues were up from US$ 28 billion in 2000 to US$ 166 billion in 2010, and there were marked gains in most sectors. {27} Europe showed even larger gains: to US$162 billion in 2010, and a predicted US$ 203 billion in 2012. {28} The UK digital economy, which accounted for 7.2% of GDP in 2011, was expected to account for 10% by 2015. {34} Growing even more rapidly is the Chinese market, with 2010 Internet sales at US$ 684 billion, 89% percent coming from the B2B sector.

New Technologies

Technology is developing at an ever faster pace and in the pipeline are truly revolutionary possibilities — flexible visual display units, improved batteries, nanotube computers, layered transistors, etc. {14} {42} Whether they become commercial possibilities in ten year or fifty years' time depends less on their inherent value than the appropriate business models being found. Major companies that have invested large sums in research, production and marketing of today's technology will clearly wish to recoup that effort before moving on to something better. Nonetheless, since labor costs are only a small component of electronic goods manufactured in China and India, {39} these more dynamic parts of the world may well come up with innovative technologies if they find ways of penetrating western markets.

Innovation

Innovation requires special people and special outlooks, which are more met in Asia and the west coast of America than in Europe or Africa. Innovation is chaotic, and the likelihood of failure is built into the process — 90% of technology companies set up in Silicon Valley fail within 18 months — but something is learned with each mistake. Companies with products that are easily copied do not survive unless — like Twitter or Facebook — protected by very large investment. {20} All this makes prediction hazardous, perhaps futile, though hardly a technology magazine or resident expert is without a crystal ball. {21} {22} {23} {24} {25} {35} {38} The predictions from Zippy Cart: {40}

Barriers to eCommerce Growth

eCommerce growth is likely to be restrained by:

1. PC saturation: many in the west now own a PC, so that the growth in Internet use will slow in these areas.
2. Inhabitants of two thirds of the world (particularly Africa, central Asia, and war-torn countries) are too poor to purchase a smart phone, let alone a PC. Immediate prospects are often not encouraging.
3. IT infrastructure is poorly developed in countries where more pressing needs exist.
4. Shopping is a social occasion, which the Internet cannot fully duplicate.
5. The Internet increasingly requires outlooks and skill sets that older people find difficult to acquire.

Looking Ahead

Commerce is the great social mixer, promoting travel, respect for others' abilities and understanding of cultural differences. Today the Internet offers extraordinary opportunities, but whether humanity makes best use of them depends less on technology than on the types of societies its better-informed citizens wish to create and belong to. {15} {16}

Questions

1. Are you optimistic or gloomy about the prospects for the Internet? Why?
2. What are the main problems facing the Internet as used today? Suggest improvements.
3. Describe three developments giving grounds for optimism. What business models apply?
4. Provide your own predictions for the Internet, with reasons.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Internet / E-commerce Statistics. Witiger. January 2010. Key statistics on Canada and worldwide ecommerce-related matters.
2. Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. Crown Business. June 2007.
3. Twitter Can't Save You by Lee Siegel. NYT. February 2011. Review of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov.
4. WikiLeaks and the dangers of zealotry by Christopher Hartman. The Daily Caller. December 2010.
5. Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga by Glenn Greenwald. Salon. September 2011.
6. Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing Our Minds, Why this Matters and What We Can Do About It by Richard Watson. Nicholas Brealey Publishing. November 2010.
7. Academic Plagiarism. Experiment Resources. Undated.
8. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu Knopf. November 2010.
9. Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace by Atlee, Benkler, Homer-Dixon et al. Earth Intelligence Network. March 2008.
10. The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Works for All by Tom Atlee and Rosa Zubizarreta The Writers' Collective. January 2010.
11. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Anchor. August 2005.
12. The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World Publications by Lawrence Norden et al. New York Univ. School of Law. June 2006
13. Electronic voting examples. Wikipedia. Listing, with references.
14. Technology Review. MIT. Good collection of articles on technological break-throughs and improvements.
15. The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain. Amazon. Yale Univ. Press. March 2009.
16. Warped Geographies of Development: The Internet and Theories of Economic Development by Mark Graham. Geospace. 2008. A nuanced, theoretical treatment.
17. UN Milenium Project. UN plan to reverse the poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people.
18. The Top Ten Internet Collaborative Tools. LoneEagles. 2000. Simple listings, now much out of date
19. The Best Collaboration Tools. Technology Magazine. Extensive list. 2007 but continuing through comments.
20. Online media Internet innovation failing in Africa, Europe, and here's why: Koos Bekker by Nur Bremmen. Memeburn. October 2011.
21. What Will The Internet Look Like In 10 Years? Internet Society. October 2009. 'Four quadrants' view: general but informative.
22. 2011 Consumer Internet Predictions by Jeremy Liew. Fast Company. December 2011. Broadly correct, so far.
23. 5 Internet Predictions for 2011. MyMarketingCoach. December 2010.
24. 6 Predictions for Social Networks in 2011 by Ben Parr. Mashable. December 2010.
25. Internet Security Predictions for 2011: The Shape of Things to Come by Kevin Haley. Symantec. November 2011. Threats and expected developments.
26. Distributing Medical. Images with Internet Technologies by Fernàndez-Bayó et al. Radiographics. April 2000.
27. 2011 Internet Sector Outlook by J. P. Morgan. SlideShare. 2011. Detailed (78 pp.) presentation, covering ebooks, mobile penetration, online advertising, travel and much else.
28. Retail E-Commerce in Western Europe. eMarketer. May 2010. Summary of a commercial study by Karin von Abrams.
29. China e-commerce sales up 22% in 2010. PhysOrg. January 2011. Brief statistics.
30. China's 89% e-commerce revenue from B2B by Hao Yan. China Daily. May 2010. Includes detailed breakdown of ecommerce pay platforms.
31. Personalized Medicine. HorizonsBusiness. Video presentation.
32. What Is eHealth (4): A Scoping Exercise to Map the Field by Claudia Pagliari et al. University of Toronto. 2005.
33. The Internet Holds the Best Ways to Recruit Physicians. MO35. May 2011.
34. Britain a 'nation of digital shopkeepers' by Tim Bradshaw. FT. October 2010.
35. A road trip into the future by Chris Nuttall. FT. January 2011. Innovation in cars.
36. Iranian Crackdown Goes Global by Farnaz Fassihi. WSJ. December 2009.
37. From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere by Nathan Schneider. The Nation. October 2011.
38. Future Trends Presentation -V.2. Slideshare. August 2011. Poor display but useful material.
39. iPhone 3G S Carries $178.96 BOM and Manufacturing Cost, iSuppli Teardown Reveals by Andrew Rassweiler.iSuppli. June 2009.
40. 10 Ecommerce Trends for 2011 All Merchants Must Know by Nick Grant. ZippyCart. November 2010.
41. Webscape. BBC Click. Kate Russell's review of new and interesting sites and applications.
42. Graphene: Future IT. ZDNet. October 2011. Silicon's successor.
43. The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford. CreateSpace. September 2009.
44. Government Lies About Spying Again and Again . . . Here's What's Really Going On by WashingtonBlog. Global Research. October, 2013.