This was helpfull in CYCH trading yesterday~
Be Well
BKW
A long-anticipated Commerce Department report on digital commerce reiterates much of what is already known but may be a message worth repeating nonetheless: The sector is growing at a rate faster than any other on earth.
At a briefing scheduled for 9:00 a.m. EDT today, Commerce Secretary William Daley will unveil a work of research that finds:
Internet traffic is doubling every 100 days, yielding a yearly growth rate of more than 700 percent.
Between 1993 and 1997, Internet users rocketed from 3 million to more than 100 million.
Just four years after the Internet was opened to the public at large, 50 million people were connected to it. It took radio and TV 38 years and 13 years, respectively, to reach that mark.
Information technologies have driven more than 25 percent of real economic growth over the past five years.
Workers in the software and services industry made an average of $56,000 last year, double the $28,000 average wage for the private sector overall.
Business-to-business transactions on the Internet will likely surpass $300 billion by 2002.
The study, titled "The Emerging Digital Economy," will be available this morning at www.ecommerce.gov following Secretary Daley's speech, Commerce spokesman Bill Buck said.
Kate Delhagen, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., praised the administration for doing its homework on the issue. "It's a very succinct summary from the government," she said. "They understand that it's a legitimate business, that it's not without significant implications on the economy, and that new policies will be part of the Internet economy."
Nonetheless, she said, the report said little about controversies like the never-ending battle over encryption technologies, privacy protection online and Internet taxation. Regarding taxation, for instance, the paper said only that the federal government opposed "discriminatory" taxes on Internet commerce without defining what discriminatory meant. On encryption, the report remains largely silent, as well. Companies "await a resolution of current export limitations on encryption software before they plan to increase their Internet business," the department wrote.
"There are some issues out there," Delhagen said. "They know about them - they just don't address them here."
The report is a follow-on to the previous Framework for Electronic Commerce policy paper unveiled at a White House ceremony July 1. White House officials then pledged a hands-off approach to the Internet - a goal whose realization is still open to debate.
The Commerce Department has also taken the lead on a number of other cyberspace issues, including personal privacy protection and its relationship to doing business online. The department will host a summit on privacy May 13-14 in which children's issues are expected to weigh heavily.
Most recently, department officials made recommendations on how best to move responsibility for Internet domain name registration from the National Science Foundation to the private sector. Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration is expected to make further recommendations on the matter within the next few weeks.
Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration can be reached at www.ntia.doc.gov |
