The Accidental Superhighway. For the past few years the titans of media and communications have waged a war for the digital future. With great fanfare, telephone and cable TV companies have launched dozens of trials to demonstrate their vision of speedy electronic networks, connecting homes to a boundless trove of information, communication, education and fun. Shambling toward their distant goal of a wired world, they have been too busy to notice the unruly bunch of computer hackers, engineers and students scurrying about their feet. They should have paid more attention.
Impatience is built in to the design of the Web itself.
Every page of it is riddled with tempting, graphically highlighted links, promising that something more exciting lies just a mouse-click away. It's like a vast library in which any page of any book can lead to others in many other volumes, possibly on another continent. It is the footnote's revenge. Kapor, Mitchell , Architecture is politics. A network is either open or closed with respect to who may have access to it, who determines its specific uses, who may supply content, who can provide the equipment used, how interfaces and standards are determined, and whether the technical details are public or private.