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Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.

No matter how much it's growing, the Internet still is a pretty specific demographic. It doesn't necessarily represent the general populace.

Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.

By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.

When I was born, the Internet was barely two years old. It was the preserve of academics, used to connect dozens rather than billions of users. There weren't many who predicted it would transform our world.

Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.

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.

You could take the Internet enthusiasm that was happening in 1999 and 2000 here in the U.S., and in China it was three-to-five times more ebullient.

The Internet has become important on the world's stage.

And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or internet advertising, they were all right - they were just wrong in time.