"Battle For The Soul Of The Internet":http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981132,00.html

I just read an interesting Time magazine article written in March of 2005 that described many of the issues surrounding the newly widespread use of the Internet and made a few interesting predictions as to the future of the young technology. The article starts by recounting the story of Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, who by sending a simple message advertising their services as a husband and wife law firm became one of the first large scale Internet spammers. The case of Canter and Siegel raised a lot of issues that persist to this day such as Internet spam, the commercialization of the Internet, the rampant advertisements and the issue of proper Internet etiquette. The issues have become much more complex and have multiplied greatly as the Internet's population has increased to almost 2 billion people. At the time of the Time article's publication, the Internet's population was only about 25 million, an increase of almost 76 times. The article somewhat accurately predicts that the Internet will be a major technology in the future but fails in its prediction of the importance of the technology. It also speaks about the double sided sword aspect of the Internet, documenting the Clinton's administration's difficulty in incorporating the Internet into the education system due to the fear that providing children access to the Internet was also providing them access to the pornography that can be found on the Internet. These issues still exist in other forms today. We as a society are constantly trying to strike a balance between the negative and positive influences that technology has on our lives. I found the article very interesting both for its eerie premonitions and its wildly inaccurate predictions on the future of the Internet.