As most of us know too well, the end of the year brings a deluge of “best of” lists and predictions for the coming year (in part to fill the pages of newspapers and magazines that have little or no actual news to print, but still need to put something in to keep the ads from bumping into each other). The Economist has come out with a look at what we can expect from the Internet next year, and one of those things — according to the respected periodical — is that the net will slow down.
Apparently, all the new devices and video and applications are causing a traffic jam on the “information superhighway” (used ironically, I hope). There’s just one problem with the Economist’s vision of the near future: Most of it is just wrong. I was really looking forward to dismantling some of the assumptions in the article, and then I discovered that Marc Andreessen had already done that — and better than I likely would have. And he’s a lot nicer about it than I would have been too 🙂