 WindoWatch                   The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
 Volume 1  No. 6                                                  August 1995

                                 An Editorial

 The Electronic SuperHighway Evolving

 It's an International Flea Market in the making!  Let your fingers do the
 walking and let your modem carry you into the virtual yellow pages.  It
 can become the newest  edition of the Home Shopping Channel hawked by
 main line vendors of reputation and capital. As in life, the one thing we
 can count upon is change, and when on the Internet, change is very
 rapidly.  To some, unregulated change will lead to chaos while others
 equate regulation of the Internet with destruction of the Internet .

 My own evolving view is that if the Internet is going to shrivel and
 shrink, it will be of trite with commerce fueling the banal and
 commonplace.  There were those who warned us very early in the game that
 the demands and practices of  business was going to do in the Internet.
 It was this group who insisted that no advertising be allowed and
 probably invented the term spamming with commercialization in mind. The
 Web browser was born and they lost the good fight!

 Remember the great hope of television with the expectation of
 educational and cultural opportunities? TV became many things unpleasant
 but mostly it became boring and predictable!  Hence the birthing of
 cable.

 It's much too early to say that the Internet as we know it, is
 defenseless and is going to crumble. It's not too early to suggest that
 perhaps the Internet is not an Electronic Super highway but rather a
 short interstate with promising features like a very large international
 mall.  It must be our responsibility to protect users of the Internet
 from the hucksters, -of  sex,  sedition or stupidity, by speaking out.
 It is also our responsibility to understand that the Internet is going to
 change....many times, to meet the demands of the growing numbers of users
 who also have every right to quit and start their own.  At this writing,
 the Federal government has plans to do exactly that for itself and its
 agencies including State and local governments who wish to participate.

 There will undoubtedly be many highways with differing goals connected
 through  gateways each serving their own clientele.  As long as the
 Internet provides access to the many and seeks to continue its effort to
 disseminate information, it will have the vitality to fend off this
 upcoming assault with its familiar threat of the marketing of trite!


