Being able to compete for consumers' attention and dollars over the preciousness of access is a thing of the past. Everyone is using the Internet to globally market a product.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
The rise of digital technology put marketers in a bind. No longer a captive audience, consumers were splitting their time across devices, social networks and websites.
The Internet provides the access to resources, so it's incumbent upon the people who control those resources to make sure that the economic engine stays intact.
We all know how the Internet has changed the lives of consumers: it's changed how we communicate, how we shop, how we meet people. It's changed things for businesses too.
We have people who pay to use our products and services, and they are heavily engaged in our content. If you erase the brand perceptions of AOL, and consider that people pay to use our properties, you would probably consider this one of the most valuable audiences on the Internet.
The industry must adhere to certain consumer protection norms if the Internet is to remain an open platform for innovation.
When I started eBay, it was a hobby, an experiment to see if people could use the Internet to be empowered through access to an efficient market. I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of a social impact.
The thing we have to be careful of is that the Internet is a global communications medium, and if one country tips the balance in regulating its use or regulating what companies or individuals do on the web, it could have an economic impact that might be unintended, quite frankly, by the regulations themselves.
Well, another market is being created now out of Internet technology.
The beauty of the Internet is there's a niche market for everything, and if you can focus on it, you can build a sustainable and viable business of it.