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To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (1506)	5/12/1999 11:19:00 AM
From: Thomas	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5853

Hi Scott, You seem to be heading down a treacherous and slippery slope. Why do you think that the deployment of more (proprietary) intelligence into the core of the network is the way to "improve" the infrastructure? It seems to me that the more proprietary stuff you jam into the core of the network the less useful the network will become (as among the key drivers today are ubiquity and openness). Of course it is tempting for the equipment suppliers to move toward more proprietary equipment and protocols to build up and protect their own market position, but this is a real peril for the Internet. I do believe that the caching and object routing will be big. That will raise big issues, though. I would much prefer to have more people thinking about the end-points (i.e. the edges). . . Cheers, Thomas

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (1506)	5/13/1999 1:24:00 AM
From: Joe Wagner	Respond to of 5853

Hi Scott, It seems to me that as the cost of digital storage and bandwidth declines, major institutions will find themselves rapidly restructuring and becoming integrated into the internet infrastructure. I know this is a different type of infrastructure than you are discussing, but it should still be considered as a piece of the overall internet puzzle. As an example, the restructuring of Universities around a sophisticated digital medium instead of around books >>There are also ways to improve the infrastructure itself ... don't just think about the end-points ... how do you make the infrastructure a much more intelligent part of the puzzle? As part of the country's information infrastructure (society's official knowledge bank), I think Universities should view their knowledge base, as Human Capital that should be digitized and loaned out like money from the bank (accessed over the internet at an hourly fee), to the general public. They should create a “Super Encyclopedia” of digital multimedia information online (with all of the books in the libraries online), that is constantly updated and tied into the search engines of the internet. The plunging costs of bandwidth and storage are obviously unleashing powerful economic forces. I think we are closing in on price points that will cause a flood of new data to be stored online. I think that is why the predictions for growth in the storage industry are so optimistic (i.e. personal data, music, movies, public libraries, business data, commerce etc...everything will move online..). It will be a sea change and the economics will be to move and store massive amounts of data at very low prices. I wonder if companies like Global Crossing will become the first trillion dollar companies. Any thoughts on which companies will become the first trillion dollar companies? JW