The widespread adoption of broadband and the continued advances in personal computing technology are finally making it possible for the collective creation of an online world on a realistic scale.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.
I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.
We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.
Technology has forever changed the world we live in. We're online, in one way or another, all day long. Our phones and computers have become reflections of our personalities, our interests, and our identities. They hold much that is important to us.
We must speed up the deployment of broadband in order to bring high-speed data services to homes and businesses. The spread of information technology has contributed to a steady growth in U.S. productivity.
The world is being re-shaped by the convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data, community and other powerful forces. The combination of these technologies unlocks an incredible opportunity to connect everything together in a new way and is dramatically transforming the way we live and work.
Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded.
There's been a big evolution since the days of personal computing. People had a concept of one computing device per family or maybe per person. We've clearly evolved to computing devices becoming more personal.
Everyone knows that the broadband era will breed a new generation of online services, but this is only half of the story. Like any innovation, broadband will inflict major changes on its environment. It will destroy, once and for all, the egalitarian vision of the Internet.