PEOPLE say the Internet is in the process of becoming commercialised and maybe from the perspective of those commercialising the Net, it has not come very far.
But from my perspective as a Net user in the pre-commercial days, most of the trek appears to have been made and, unfortunately, it is not all for the better.
I am not condemning moves to use the Internet for commercial purposes.
After all, it is through this that the whole on-line community will expand and find new uses different from anything conceived in its purely academic and research-orientated infancy.
What worries me, though, is that as the Net commercialises, the amount of waste - of bandwidth, storage, and system resources - is increasing.
The recent development of a technology to allow transactions to take place on the Internet using a system which would provide secure exchange of credit card information, is an example.
