Home » Negroponte’s (wrong) prophecy: “No government will be able to stop the Internet”

Negroponte’s (wrong) prophecy: “No government will be able to stop the Internet”

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On November 7, 1995, he came to the headquarters of the Sardinian Union in Cagliari organized a convention of Video On Line: it was a futuristic project, launched by Nicola Grauso less than a year earlier, but which had already conquered a leading role among the pioneers of the Web.

The meeting in Cagliari was attended by managers and diplomats from 26 countries, the same ones that Grauso had contacted in the spring with the proposal to “bring them to the Internet”. The guest of honor was a character who at the time had a reputation as a guru, Nicholas Negroponte. Ten years earlier he had founded the MediaLab at MIT in Boston, which had immediately become the laboratory where the applications and impacts of new digital technologies were studied. Negroponte was fascinating and he was fascinated by the feat of Nicolas Grauso. He had been to Cagliari several times in the previous months, but on 7 November he intervened by videoconference. His speech went down in history as “Negroponte’s prophecy” and is reported on several sites.

Here’s what he said: “Over the past three or four months we’ve realized that The Internet is the information superhighway of the future as it is growing at an absolutely incredible speed. Sites double in number every 60 days and homepages are reached every 4 seconds. But the most interesting thing is that it is no longer an American phenomenon: more than 50% of the Internet is now outside the United States. The Internet is now made up of multilingual traffic and I must say that Video On Line, in this, has great merit because it seems to me that it has worked more than anyone else to make the Internet multilingual: It is possible that governments in the future will try to control the Internet, but they will not be able to. They will try to introduce rules and regulations that slow down the power of the internet, but it won’t work. These attempts will certainly fail to obtain results, because the Internet is an absolutely unstoppable phenomenon, controllable only by users. Above all, it is a tool of the people, not of governments; a tool for young people to learn, for the elderly to reconnect with society. One problem that will need to be resolved in the next six months is confidentiality and data encoding. Data confidentiality is an important factor in e-commerce. We know that data security on the Internet is not 100 percent guaranteed today. I’m meeting with the US government next week and trying to get it to eliminate export laws that prevent data encryption. I think a lot of work will have to be done on this, because personal and commercial data security must be ensured at a high level. I think that when this is possible, we will see an explosion of Internet commerce. “

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Thus spoke Negroponte in the report published in L’Unione Sarda on 7 November.

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