And I believe that rather than that being a disadvantage, this means it's more important than ever before to get connected to the Net, to learn as much as possible about how it works, to learn to use its services. The reason is that the Net is going to be privatized in a major way. Not only will it be turned over to the administration of a few large corporations, Ameritech among them, but its services and performance will be repackaged by commercial vendors and sold as the networking platform to corporations worldwide. The commercial software vendors will privatize a publicly developed network software package. The vast majority of commentators and reporters covering this information superhighway, the I-Way, the InfoBahn, what ever buzzword you want to apply to it, have been blinded by the faddishness of the whole thing and fail to see the issue through a commercial perspective.
Commerce cuts little slack for any thing or anybody and the Internet is no exception.
Businesses everywhere are going to make the public Internet a private, highly customized possession. Unlike the press and the public, business sees through the hype about the potential of the Internet. Business I.T. departments see clearly that the Net is a networking protocol, a tool, an interoperable standard. The Internet is easily the largest applied computing research project ever undertaken. The network theory underpinning the Internet directly challenges the commercial products of every network operating system vendor.