The Missing Internet
Extraordinary, insightful article. An excerpt:

“There is a tendency to confuse artifacts with concepts. More important than the current Internet is the concept behind it [^] extreme simplicity. Traditionally telecommunications is defined in terms of services such as telephony and television. The Internet itself just carries packets of bits and doesn’t even guarantee that they will be delivered. The Web and, for that matter, telephony and television, are applications that are created outside of the transport network itself.”

And:

“You can think of the bursting of the so-called Internet bubble as a pileup as we hit a wall. While much of the value of such companies was indeed fantastic (in the sense of a fantasy) there was reality in the idea that anyone can innovate and create something new. After all, if the Web was so easy why stop there? But most of the innovation was about new ways to use the Web for commerce. What was less obvious but more important was the difficulty of creating new innovations like the web and email. We have been simply mining just one small vein when there are so many others.”