Christine--Esther speaks on y2k:
techweb.com
Y2K Glitch Will Burst Internet Bubble
(05/04/99, 2:07 p.m. ET)
By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb
NEW YORK -- The booming market for Internet-oriented stocks is coming to an end, said Esther Dyson, an Internet business guru, on Tuesday.
"Enjoy it while it's around," Dyson said at the Silicon Alley Breakfast Club, a New York networking association for new-media workers. Dyson talked about the speed of change in the industry, the changes that are coming in the domain systems, and policy issues.
Money is pouring into the industry, but may be getting in the way of conducting business, said Dyson, chairwoman of EDventure Holdings, a New York-based high-tech investment firm.
"I'm on the board of a company that is doing so many deals that it can't do business," she said. "But, if someone wants to offer you $10 million to produce nothing, you can't turn that down," she said. "The industry is nuts -- too much is changing too fast."
The breaking point for Internet-enthralled investors will come in the new year, catalyzed by the year 2000 computer bug, Dyson said.
"I don't think there are going to be disasters, but just enough elevators will stop, causing millions of people to have bad days," she said. "There is going to be a change in sentiment, and people are going to notice most of these [Internet] companies are not making any money."
While Dyson sits on the boards of more than a dozen companies and has investments in another dozen, she is also engineering a major change for the Internet as head of ICANN, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that is redesigning how the Internet domains are managed.
The group instituted its first change in April by selecting five companies to compete with sole registrar Network Solutions Inc., of Herndon, Va., in selling Internet addresses. The five companies are testing the domain name registry system until June. Then, if they meet a set of criteria, 29 companies -- including NSI -- will be selected to register domains.
NSI is still maintaining the actual registry.
"We have created some competition for NSI," Dyson said. "The service part is now open to competition, but NSI still has a monopoly on the registry. We are not at the end, and there are important issues to decide after we solicit comments."
In policy terms, Dyson said ISPs should have to pay into the Universal Service Fund as the telephone companies do. "I don't see any justification for excepting ISPs," she said.
Dyson said education is a more critical issue for the United States than Internet access, and IT should be applied to education to improve it.
"Give parents e-mail to communicate with the schools and put information about schools, like grades and teacher rankings on websites," she said. "Improving education is not just putting the Internet in schools." |
