This is not the typical Internet image sold these days. We've been told, time and time again, that the Internet will be all things to all people, a combination interactive entertainment medium, shopping experience and information center rolled all into one. Well, you get the idea. All of this interactivity, a word still bandied about too much for its own good, sounds great. But it's not here yet and may not be for some time.
Speed is, of course, one of the main issues.
To push something that looks like video you'd get on a television or sounds like audio you'd hear on a home stereo is pretty much impossible over a standard phone line. The other, and more important issue, is that the Internet is destined to become something entirely new, a synthesis of all existing mediums into something like all of them but uniquely different. In the early days of television, it was neat enough to see the Brooklyn Bridge and the San Francisco Bay Bridge on your screen at the same time, as in a famous early news broadcast. That spectacle was a big deal at the time, but we've since moved beyond suspension bridges as a source of entertainment. These are not necessarily bad in and of themselves.