This is the age of the internet. The daily papers carry technology supplements extolling the wonders that will soon descend. No reader can be left in any doubt: better and better technology is about to solve every human need. The future is here, and it is wonderful.
In reality, we are being exposed to a series of technological fads. The current fad is wireless application protocol. This is the capacity to deliver the internet via a mobile phone, palm-top computer, or other sorts of roaming device.
Six months ago the fad was XML (the ability of computers of talk to each other over the internet). Before that it was voice over IP (a plan to replace the world's telephone networks with the internet). And before that, something called virtual private networks (that would allow large organisations to run national or global computer networks over the internet).
None of these has delivered the glowing promises. This is nothing new. Many years ago the computer industry developed a concept called vaporware: products which never arrive, or never do what they promise to.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the internet was protected from this, because it was not considered a commercially viable product. It simply connected people together and allowed them to get on with their work.
In the early 1990s, before the internet became the path to instant wealth for the most awful people you could imagine, there was the information superhighway. The virtues of this wonderful new method of receiving information were also extolled in the daily press. In the media hype, information meant Hollywood movies.
Most people who remember the information superhighway probably assume that it became the internet, but this is not true. From a commercial point of view the internet is a diversion from the main game, an accident of technology which got in the way of profit.
That is why the internet is such a poor commercial proposition today. Every time you buy a book from Amazon.com, the company loses money. Airline tickets, groceries, and most other products sold over the internet, are sold at a loss.
This was not the plan. If the internet had not come along, via expensive proprietary connections, media organisations would have had a stranglehold on a whole range of services which they would have charged top prices for.
Even the technology of the internet is wrong. The information superhighway was to be based on a technology called asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). Despite billions of dollars of investment by phone companies around the world, this technology is in its dying gasps, being pushed aside by TCP/IP, the internet's technology.
Does this matter to socialists? Who cares if data is carried in TCP/IP datagrams or ATM cells? The answer is yes. The internet today was not designed as a commercial distribution network. Its underlying technology is one reason why the internet is so hard to police, and to turn to commercial advantage, as compared to radio, television and satellite networks. That does not mean the whole internet cannot be turned into a source of profit for the media magnates. But at the moment it is only profitable for the internet equipment and software manufacturers.
The heart of internet usage is currently outside the hands of the profiteers, but they are knocking at the doors. The early March deal between Microsoft and pay-TV software supplier NDS, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, is a sign of the times. Murdoch would love to turn the internet into a television repeat, along the lines that the information superhighway was meant to be.
Along with the hundreds of millions of people who use e-mail, chat sessions, information access and other aspects of the internet, the progressive movement has a stake in defending and extending its usefulness and accessibility.
By Greg Harris