Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA, spoke at the Milken Institute
Forum on Sept. 21 on “How the Internet Is Changing Our Social, Political, and Economic Lives.”
The following is an edited transcript of his remarks.

“How the Internet Is Changing Our Social,
Political, and Economic Lives”
Thank you. I am overwhelmed at this turnout. I don’t think it’s for me. You must be interested in this
Internet thing we’re all talking about.
But before we talk about all this, I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I got interested in the
Internet, and how this ties into some of the work I’m doing.
About three years ago, I discovered something that was really compelling to me. I discovered that television viewing among kids under the age of 14 was down for the first time in the history of television.
For the first time in the 51 years of television, since 1948, kids had found something they liked as much or more than television — computers and the Internet.
And this made me, as a social scientist, begin to realize that this technology phenomenon, which is not a fad, really will affect everything, and will transform much. It will have an influence like the printing press did, I believe, on just about everything. And I want to demonstrate some of that today.
We can already see some of that beginning to happen. Alan Greenspan, a few months ago, called the
Internet “the engine of the economic expansion.” It’s been linked as the single biggest cause of the increase in productivity.
As we do some historical comparisons to television, we can see that television — the most important communications medium of the last 50 years — was primarily about entertainment and leisure. The
Internet really will affect work, school, and play — just about everything. That’s a large statement, and I want to try to show you that that’s not hype by looking at some of the ways it is affecting everything.
But first, a little bit of historical perspective:
This communications revolution — and it’s not an overstated term, in this sense; it’s used in a lot of other ways overstated — is really the third communications revolution in human history.
The first would be the acquisition of language. Up until the acquisition of language, we could only convey simple ideas, by smiling or grunting or hitting people over the head. The acquisition of language allowed us to convey complex ideas and emotions.
The printing press, in the 15th century, allowed us to communicate information over great distances.
Before that, we only had an oral tradition, subject to gossip and change, and things like that.
And this era we’re in now, which I think we’re in the beginning of, much more than we are in the middle or end of, this digital age, really represents only the third revolution in communications history.
And I think it does represent change on the order of the acquisition of language and the printing press.
And, unlike the printing press, and like language, this communications revolution is interactive.
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And, although the Internet is only about 30 years old, already there have been several defining moments. The most recent defining moment occurred about 12 months ago. Unfortunately, it’s not one of the most uplifting defining moments, but it really did demonstrate how important the Internet had become.
That was the release of the Starr Report on President Clinton, in September 1998, directly onto the
Internet.
America Online said that over 800,000 people downloaded the report in its entirety within 24 hours, and that over six million people on AOL looked at at least some of the Starr Report online, within 24 hours. This is just through AOL, but they represent about 75 percent of Internet subscribers in the U.S., at least at home.
And if you look at this release of the Starr Report, it really became a defining moment for a couple of reasons. First, it really did bestow credibility on the Internet. It showed that this was an effective means for the distribution of information.
The second reason, and probably the most compelling, is it bypassed traditional media. This was compelling, because it was done for political reasons. The Congress — the Republican-controlled Congress
— which was considering impeaching and ultimately did impeach the President, was afraid that the salacious details of the Starr Report wouldn’t be covered on traditional news media. It might get into tabloids and things like that, but they wanted the really gruesome details — the details like the cigar — to directly go into the homes of Americans, and they thought the Internet was the best way to do it.
And the third thing that happened with the Starr Report is it demonstrated to non-users how important the Internet had become.
One last note on the Starr Report: Ironically, the Congress that released the Starr Report directly onto the Internet was the same Congress that had passed the Communications Decency Act that made it illegal to put pornographic or obscene information onto the Internet. And had the Supreme Court not overturned the CDA, Congress might have been guilty of violating its own act with the release of the
Starr Report.
As we finish the 20th century, and we’ve lived with the Internet for the last few years, we can begin to see some positive and negative developments on our life and our society. And I want to share with you some of what we’re beginning to find. You’ll see some similarities in a few minutes between some of the positive signs and the negative signs.
Some of the positive signs are the fact that the Internet is so difficult to regulate, the fact that good people on the Internet can find each other in ways that they couldn’t have found each other before, and that anybody can be a journalist. Now, let’s look at some of this in a little more detail and see what it means, starting with the difficulty to regulate.
This isn’t a history lesson, but most of you probably know a little bit about the origins of the Internet.
The Internet actually began almost exactly 30 years ago — September 2, 1969 — at UCLA as the ARPAnet, ARPA being the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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ARPA was not really trying to design a new, revolutionary communications device. All ARPA wanted to do was find a way to get major research universities to share computers so it didn’t have to buy a computer for every single university. So they created this network of computers that all of these universities could share.
And therefore, on this network, by design, there was no headquarters, no core. And since this was a government-supported project, commerce itself was actually illegal until ‘95.
This notion of no core, and all of this difficulty to regulate, has led to some of the folklore of the
Internet. The French still believe it’s a tool of the Defense Department, and don’t trust it for that reason.
Part of the folklore that the fathers of the Internet insist is not true is that it was designed to withstand a nuclear blast.
There are four or five fathers. The paternity is slightly in question, although we know, from a group, who the fathers were. The fathers admit they would have been appalled if they could have imagined what the Internet was becoming. They didn’t design something for people to exchange recipes or pornography or mundane messages. They saw this as an elite network for research and were not inventing a new way of communicating.
But this Internet, without any central core, that is difficult — some say impossible — to regulate, has already had some profoundly positive impacts on governments’ ability to regulate, particularly repressive governments. We already can see some very, very important effects.
Thirty years ago, if you were the Soviet Union or another repressive government, it was relatively easy to block information. All you had to do was jam broadcast signals, search bags at airports, and tap phones or open mail.
In the late-1990s, that just doesn’t do it anymore. Instead of smuggling in a book through the airport, now you can smuggle in a CD-ROM in a much smaller space that contains a whole library.
The Internet can change URLs daily or hourly, as has happened in Indonesia. It’s very difficult to track down. You can shut off all the access, but that’s about all that you can do.
And governments have found that the kinds of things they tried to do in the past, they couldn’t do.
In Indonesia, the Internet and E-mail was essential to the fall of Suharto. Indonesia, a nation of 17,000 islands, had a surprisingly large middle class that did have access to computers. And people were able to share ideas and share Web sites that moved on almost a daily basis, and really coordinate in a way that had never been seen in Indonesia before.
Most of you know that Singapore is no stranger to regulation. They’re quite comfortable banning chewing gum, banning pornography and satellite dishes, and having the death penalty for drug smuggling.
Singapore will become the first country on Earth, I think, to achieve close to a 100 percent Internet penetration in the next three years. Singapore realizes that the kinds of ways they’ve regulated in the past just won’t work anymore.
Symbolically, the Singapore Broadcasting Authority, the people who regulate the Internet, have banned
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the 100 most offensive Web sites. And they’re not actually even the most offensive — they’re things like
Playboy and Penthouse. They’re actually the most famous offensive Web sites. And they realize that is just a little tip on the mountain. They can’t begin to ban all the content that they would like to ban.
And they realize they have two choices — completely ban the Internet, or let people see things they didn’t want them to see in the past. And they’ve made the decision that banning the Internet will retard their progress as an international power.
China is coming to the same conclusion, slower. But nevertheless, China realizes that banning the
Internet will not allow China to be a 21st century power, and they are letting the Internet move slowly.
They’re trying to control the access, but in private moments, their leadership will admit that Chinese citizens are going to see things that they haven’t seen in the past, and the government is simply going to have to adapt. That’s not something they will say publicly, but they very privately feel that way.
And in Kosovo, we’ve already seen the effects of Serbians sending E-mail all over the world, stating their case — in many cases, with distortions — of Serbians spamming people all over the Western world. And, for the first time, it’s as if Americans could have communicated with Germans living in
Berlin in the Second World War.
The real implications as to how that will change prolonged struggles are yet to be determined. But the
Internet has already had some significant influence, because it’s so difficult to regulate, in really diminishing the power of repressive regimes.
A second positive sign is the Internet brings good people together. This is obvious, but it’s important.
If you think about it, a hundred years ago, you might have four people each living on a separate continent who couldn’t have found each other. They would have had to take out full-page ads in newspapers to advertise what they were interested in.
Now, these four or five people with very finite interests can find each other, and together they can do remarkably wonderful things. Distance becomes irrelevant. They can compose poetry; they can invent things; they can discover cures for this or that. The Internet brings good people together.
And thirdly, we’ve seen that through the Internet, anybody can be a journalist. In an era of fewer outlets for journalism, we’re seeing fewer voices.
And the Internet represents a way to bring newer and fresher voices out, because of the start-up costs.
To become a newspaper in society, even a small-town newspaper, can cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Start-up costs on the Internet actually can go as low as $300 for a used computer. So, we’re seeing some real diversity in the voices of people who are online as journalists.
These are some of the positive signs we can see. Now, some of the negative signs:
The Internet is difficult to regulate. It brings bad people together. And anybody can be a journalist.
And I’m not just doing this to be symmetrical or funny. There really are some profound implications to the negative sides.
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Clearly, the Internet itself is neutral. How we use it determines whether it’s positive or negative. Now, let me go through this a little bit.
Difficult to regulate has wonderful implications for bringing down repressive governments or putting information into the hands of citizens and allowing them to challenge official views from government.
But it is a disaster for intellectual property — the rights of artists to protect their ideas.
In print, we’re already seeing that almost gone. I have a friend who is a federal judge, and about a year and a half ago she had to hear the case when Brad Pitt was suing Playgirl Magazine for publishing naked pictures. By the time the case got to the judge, they estimated it had been distributed to ten million places on the Internet. Her ruling was irrelevant. We’re seeing that already in print.
For those of you who follow this closely, 1999 is the year that the music business is being turned upside down. All of these large music companies are trying to figure out how they can charge on the Internet.
But right now, through MP3, you can download high-quality music, pay nothing, and it’s a serious threat to those who create music. And we’re about two or three years away from the same problem with video and film.
Interestingly, this month, Adam Sandler is releasing a six-minute film directly onto the Internet. The movie business is about to change as well. And the MPAA, Jack Valenti’s group, has worried for years about people who duplicate tapes in Asia and distribute them. That’s a party compared to what they’re about to face.
Maybe you’re familiar with the domain-name problem, which is beginning to go away, where people buy domain names or use them and then charge those who want to use them later tens of thousands or millions of dollars. People also capitalize on domain-name confusion.
UCLA faced the problem about a year ago. UCLA, being an educational institution, has a URL of
UCLA.edu. But most people know the .com. Somebody set up a pornographic site with UCLA.com.
UCLA got it shut down. The White House is Whitehouse.gov — GOV for government — but
TheWhitehouse.com is a porno site.
We really have entered an era, in the short term, that is like the frontier of the 19th century, where there isn’t law, people with the biggest guns or the biggest lawyers come in, and we’re waiting to see what kinds of laws and order will be established. And I think we’re going to see some soon, at least in areas such as tax.
Conversely to bringing good people together, the Internet brings bad people together — bad people with horrible things on their mind. Whether it’s perverse sexual practices, child molesting or being predators, they can find each other and share information. According to a conference I was just at with law enforcement, almost all child pornography of the last 30 years has been dumped onto the Internet, and people are learning how to find it. These barriers of distance disappear.
And about a month and a half ago, America Online and the Centers for Disease Control realized that an outbreak of venereal disease on the East Coast could be traced to an AOL chat room. So, this whole notion of what can happen is beginning to change. AOL was very embarrassed by that.

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And then, third, the flip side that anybody can be a journalist. That means that it may be cheap to get on the Internet and be a journalist, but there’s no guarantee that those people will be trained with professional standards.
Matt Drudge got a tremendous amount of mileage out of breaking the Monica Lewinsky story on the
Internet. But Drudge himself didn’t really break it. The story was broken by Michael Issikoff of
Newsweek magazine. But Newsweek has standards of at least two sources — verifiable sources. They were taking on the President of the United States, and they didn’t want to do it until they were sure — something we would hope most journalists would do. And Issikoff was still checking out a couple more details, and would have printed that story about a week later — because the story was right.
Drudge wasn’t bound by those standards. He didn’t have a multi-million-dollar publication behind him that had a history of accuracy and really cared about freedom and quality of the press. And
Drudge went with the story, happened to be right, and got credit.
He went with about four more stories the same year that were wrong. Drudge just isn’t bound by the same standards.
Some of you may know the sad case of Pierre Salinger, John Kennedy’s press secretary, and ABC’s
Bureau Chief in Europe. About two years ago, Salinger held a press conference establishing that he had proof that TWA Flight 800 had been downed by an American missile by mistake. And when asked for his proof, he used information he had gotten off of the Internet. It turned out, the information had been discredited and was worthless. I don’t know what Salinger was thinking when he did this, but Salinger has pretty much been out of sight ever since.
The information on the Internet is not reliable. Americans, in my view, despite our cynicism towards the press, we do tend to believe most of what we see in the newspapers or on television. And we’re going to go through a period that we’re not going to be able to trust what we see on the Internet. It comes from anybody.
You may have seen a recent news tip that was alleged to be from Bloomberg, but really wasn’t from
Bloomberg. It was somebody trying to inflate their stock price.
We’re not used to people openly deceiving us in print, or this equivalent of print. We’re going to go through a very tough period of not knowing what to believe that, in my view, or my hope, ultimately will lead to a return to a reliance on professional and filtered information.
These are just a couple of the positive and negative developments we’ve seen to this point.
This brings us, as we look at this environment in which the network’s operating, to the project that I’m directing, and one that I think, of course, is extraordinarily interesting and important.
I want to share a little bit about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and what we’re finding in our own independent work.
Those of us who worked in television considered it a lost opportunity, if not a tragedy, that no one went into American households in 1948 and watched what happened as people acquired television sets. If we had done that, if we had gone into households in 1948, and then gone in every year afterwards to
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watch households before they had television, and then how their lives changed as they had television, we would have been able to learn things such as: Where did the time for television come from? Did it come from reading newspapers or books? Did it come from talking as a family, talking on the phone, sleeping? How did television change our buying behavior?
How did it change our voting behavior? Did it make us more connected to these ads we began to see on television, and to politics and politicians, or did it make us cynical and disconnected?
How did it affect our desire to travel, and where we wanted to travel and who we wanted to be when we grow up — and a thousand other questions.
I think the influence of the Internet will dwarf that of television, because the Internet is about every aspect of our lives. The biggest element of the Internet already is business-to-business — something we don’t even apply to television.
So, believing that the Internet will dwarf the power of television, and that no one did what we should have done for television, we have started a project where we’ll go into American households. We’ll go into 2,000 households every year over the next generation or so. Those 2,000 households will be divided, just as the population is divided, among those who have PCs and those who don’t. Right now, it’s about fifty-fifty, in America. Half of our sample will not have PCs.
We want to find out why people don’t have PCs. What are their attitudes as to what’s online? What would it take to get them online? And then, we want to establish a baseline of media use — how much television they watch; how many neighbors they recognize on their street; how they shop and make buying decisions; how they make parental decisions — punishing their children; their political and social attitudes. And then we want to watch what happens as they acquire this technology, and see how their attitudes and behaviors change.
To me, it’s a most remarkable and simple project. We deserve no credit for thinking this up — it’s just obvious. I hope we deserve some credit for getting it mobilized, which has been like a war.
From year 1, half of our households will have it. We’ll see how you go from an early user to a mature user. And we’ll be able to see, in 10 years, who still doesn’t have the Internet and why, and how do they do things off-line that the rest of us are doing online?
But this project is very different, in four very important ways.
First, most of the marketing research you’re familiar with can tell you who’s on the Internet or who’s not — the digital divide issue — or where they go on the Internet. That’s of interest to us, but much more interesting is how the Internet is changing shopping and buying.
It’s not just, do they shop, but is there, for want of a better term, a “Price Club” effect on the Internet?
Because goods and services are so accessible, cheaper and fun, do you go and buy more than you intended to buy if you had gone to a store? Which goods and services will people buy? What won’t they buy? How does it change?
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Do we gain international friends through E-mail at the expense of friends on our street, or do we just spend more time with more people? There are all of these issues about connection to the civic process.
We’re looking not just at usage, but at the effects.
The second thing we’re doing very differently, which I think is the most important thing, is we’re actually more interested in non-users than users. Right now, I want to look at people who don’t have this technology and watch how they change as they acquire it, which is why we’re trying to go places before people have this technology.
I wish we had begun this five years ago, but you couldn’t have convinced anybody five years ago that this was important.
Third, we’re doing this longitudinally. We’re going into the same households, to the degree we can keep them together, over a generation. I say 10 or 15 years to our funders, but the truth is, we’ll probably never stop. If you were starting this in 1948 with television, why would you stop?
And lastly, this isn’t an American phenomenon, this is an international phenomenon. So, we are starting in Year 1 with Singapore and Italy as our partners. We’ve added, for Year 2, China, Germany,
Hungary, Sweden, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. And in Year 3, we’re adding Latin American and African countries. We have over 60 countries that have expressed an interest in working with us, and we’ve already lined up about 17 or 18. So we’ll really have an international perspective on these issues.
And, lastly, as far as gaining support for this, we have gotten support from all elements of society. On the corporate side, this thing is supported, with absolutely no influence, by America Online, Microsoft,
Disney, Sony, GTE, Pacific Bell, News Corp., Merrill Lynch — I’m missing a couple. The press liked the fact that it was the first time AOL and Microsoft had ever been involved in the same project. All they get to do is pay for it. And it’s also, as of last week, supported by the National Science Foundation.
Having said all that, now, the fun part. Let me share with you a little bit. The good news is that we can share a little bit of what we’re finding through a variety of sources. The bad news is, it’s very early, so this is going to change. But some of what I want to share has come through focus groups, pre-testing, a joint project we did with the Bertelsmann Foundation, which was presented in Munich last week, that looked at Australia, the United States, and Germany.
Let me just share a couple of the perceptions as to how people are using the Internet, and some of the things we’re beginning to find.
And let’s start with a very small area, of common user and non-user attitudes towards the perceptions, towards the Internet — things that users and non-users have in common.
Let’s start with the fact that almost everyone believes, whether they use the Internet or not, that it will be an essential tool for the 21st century — that it really will make a significant difference. They also believe that children who do not learn how to use the Internet will be left behind — that it’s essential to children to learn how to get online and use this.
Both groups, both users and non-users, believe that the Internet contains harmful information.
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However, as I learned in working on television, there’s very little agreement as to what’s harmful.
Parents complain about violence, but to some parents, violence is “Schindler’s List.” To others, violence is Bugs Bunny. The same thing is true on the Internet. Other than child pornography, there’s really very little agreement on what’s harmful.
And child pornography, incidentally, as I discovered at this conference Bertelsmann held in Munich, has really become the kind of bugaboo. Child pornography is not nearly as prevalent as people are afraid it is, at least according to law enforcement. And there’s not a country on Earth, according to this international consortium of law enforcement, that does not punish child pornography. There are lots of laws regarding it.
But there’s little agreement on the Internet, among those who think it’s harmful, as to exactly which content is harmful.
Not surprisingly, non-users of the Internet believe that harmful content is a bigger problem than users believe it is. As people get used to the Internet, they say that the harmful content tends to recede into the background, and not become as common.
There does seem to be a tendency, among people who first go on the Internet, to find out quickly how bad it can be, and then, less and less of that, happily, as they continue to use it.
And what that means is we’re left with a fascinating predicament that many parents admit they don’t know how to deal with. Parents say, on the one hand, they recognize that the Internet contains harmful content. But on the other hand, it’s essential for their kids to have access to it. And they don’t know what to do.
And this is different than television. Parents know how to regulate television, if they’re willing to take the time. Television has an on-off switch; it has a channel changer. You don’t have to teach parents how to use television or how to unplug it.
But parents don’t know, in many cases, how to use computers and the Internet. And they have to be trained, frequently by their children, how to use this technology so they can then help their kids regulate the content. It’s a real problem.
It’s a problem that will go away in 20 years, when today’s eight-year-olds become parents. I think that fear, and these issues of not knowing how to deal with it, are temporary issues. But they’re very serious problems for many parents who want their kids to have this and don’t know themselves how to do deal with it.
And lastly, among non-users, it’s important to remember that non-user households still represent the majority of households in America. It’s shrinking, but it’s about 35 to 40 percent of American households that have access to the Internet. Some people have access through the office, and not at home, but the majority is still non-users. And the perceptions of non-users are still a problem for an Internet to thrive.
As an aside — in 1996-97, a fascinating study showed that in the two years of ‘96 and ‘97, whenever the word “Internet” appeared in a headline in The New York Times — and this is our best newspaper — 75 percent of the time, so, too, did one of four words: bomber, stalker, pornographer, or terrorist.
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That’s changed. If you were to do that study in 1999, the most common words would probably be stock market or billionaire.
The perception in ‘96 and ‘97 was the Internet was a place for predators and bombers. The perception, I think, in 1999 is it is a place where people are getting immense wealth very quickly. That, too, is beginning to change. But that’s the non-user perspective.
Non-users don’t go on the Internet, they say, for three reasons:
First, is fear — fear not of using it, but fear that they can’t figure out how to learn to use it. Tremendous fear. My own view is that the computers are remarkably easy to use, but the fear component, the mental block, is extraordinary. Age, of course, is a very big factor here.
Next is cost. Many people think it is more expensive now than it is. Cost is diminishing, but cost is still a reason people don’t go online.
Third is a lack of perceived need. Some people just don’t see a need.
The way I think most of these people are going to be moved, other than the aging process, online, is the same way banks got people to use ATMs, which also had this age division — younger people took to it much faster. Banks got people to use ATMs by making services cheaper by using an ATM than using a teller. More services that we pay for already are cheaper online than off-line, I think that’s going to be the compelling factor that gets the laggards or the stragglers to get online.
A small percentage of non-users are proud to be non-users, and plan to keep it that way. They don’t ever plan to go online.
This is just a phenomenon associated with technology. My dissertation was about journalism. This was in the ‘70s and early ’80s. I interviewed some of the most distinguished journalists in America. And it was amazing. I would go into those offices and you would see these Underwood typewriters, these manual typewriters with the filthy ribbons that if you typed too fast, the keys start blocking each other.
And this was in an era when people were using word processors.
And you would explain to them why they would want to use word processors, but they knew all that.
It was just part of their self-image to use these old, manual typewriters. And some of them still do. It’s amazing. There are some people who are proud to be Luddites — to not use the technology.
We also found in our focus groups some real hostility towards use — people who are resentful, who say, “That’s all everybody talks about. I see these initials or these letters on commercials all the time.”
And they’re angry. They really feel left out. They feel distanced or alienated from where they think most of society’s going.
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And many people are embarrassed that kids know the Internet so well when they don’t. They think it’s sometimes like language — that once you get past a certain point, it may be hard to read, it may be hard to learn.
We found that non-users were very familiar with movie ratings, but not very familiar with television ratings or V-chips. They don’t understand how some of these filtering processes to block programming might work.
But, most interesting, non-users don’t know if the Internet is regulated. They’re not sure. Those who think it is couldn’t tell you who it is. And non-users are much more likely to support governmental legislation than users are.
Now, looking at users, we found that most people online don’t exactly know where the time for the
Internet comes from. We’re going to monitor very closely where that time comes from, by looking at how they engage in a whole series of activities.
But even though most of them don’t know, almost everybody says at least some of the time is coming from television. And you can see that in television ratings; you can see that in research. The most recent studies show that kids’ viewing under 14 went from a high three and a half years ago of 28 hours a week to now about 21 hours a week. That’s a very significant chunk of television time.
We also found there’s a real difference of perception among users. Some who use the Internet a lot feel that it’s taking time from social activity — that it’s making them at least a bit more isolated. They sit in their room more often than they did.
And others — about equal, from what we found in the Bertelsmann project — feel it actually frees time to become more social. When you pay bills online, when you engage in all this shopping, all these things that you would have to do anyway, you actually have more time to be social.
So, there is a real difference of opinion as to what the benefits or drawbacks of technology may be.
Also, some people already see problems in households. A significant percentage admit that they see a potential for Internet addiction. Many spouses are resentful, and feel left out.
Most people say they don’t use the Internet as a family. Sometimes kids and parents use it, but parents together don’t.
We also know that a significant percentage of parents admit that they punish their children by taking away television privileges. They seem less willing to take away Internet privileges. Once again, that’s the tie between entertainment and education. Kids are rarely watching television for school. But they’re going to be doing lots of their homework and research for school online.
We’re also finding, among users — and we found this particularly in Europe — they’re not sure what to believe online. There’s real confusion as to what’s reliable. And some people say they’d like to see some kind of standard or seal or check mark that can somehow verify general accuracy. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it does show the frustration with what’s online.
The vast majority say the Internet has caused their social network to expand. That’s obvious. This is
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the first social network, a way to share information, that got faster and didn’t get more expensive.
Every other system, up to now, if you think about a phone call versus a fax versus a FedEx, as it gets quicker, it generally gets more expensive. This turns all the rules upside down. This is the fastest and the cheapest.
It’s obvious our social networks have expanded. Most users so far that we’ve talked to in this very early stage do not feel it’s at the expense of face-to-face communication, but we’re not sure they’re the best judges of that. And those are some of the issues we want to look at.
Broadband does change everything. When you move from a modem to a high-speed connection, you integrate the Internet into your life so that it’s on, generally, 24 hours a day. You don’t dial it up anymore. You start accessing things that you might not have accessed in the past. You start looking at large files, using it for what are called “push technologies,” for news, for music, for those kinds of things. And most users, in the beginning, feel that the government should leave the Internet alone. They don’t want to see the government get into it. The government is now getting into the whole tax issue of the
Internet.
A year from now, this will be much more compelling as we look at the shifts and the changes and the full detail. I’m not suggesting you invite me back every year, but two years from now, and then three years, and then ten years from now, I think we will have truly some significant data.
MILKEN INSTITUTE
Jeff Cole Speech
September 21, 1999

Milken Institute • 1250 Fourth Street • Santa Monica, California 90401
PHONE (310) 998-2600 • FAX (310) 998-2627 • E- MAIL: INFO@MILKEN-INST.ORG • WEB: WWW.MILKEN-INST.ORG

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