The Online World resources handbook

Gazing into the future http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/17.html
citizens at virtual meeting points. View public areas in real time. Access cultural
services online. Make purchases in shops. Conduct business with officials. Use toll
or advertising financed entertainment services. Make PC and video phone calls.
Visit amusement parks and casinos. Meet members of clubs and associations. See
Virtual Helsinki 2000 for an example.
These "wild" ideas are already around, but it will take time before they are generally
available all over the globe. New networks need to be in place. Powerful
communications equipment must be provided.
We also see the contours of speech based electronic conferences with automatic
translation to and from the participants' languages. Entries will be stored as text in a
form that allows for advanced online searching. We may be able to choose between the
following options:
Use voice when entering messages, rather than typing them in through the
keyboard. The ability to mix speech, text, sound and pictures (single frames or live
pictures).
Have messages delivered to you by voice, as text, or as a combination of these
(like in a lecture with visual aids).
Have text and voice converted to a basic text, which may in turn be converted to
other languages, and be forwarded to its destination as text or voice depending on
the recipients' preferences.
Pointer: CompuServe's multilingual machine translation of its MacCIM Help Forum and
World Community Forum messages. Every three minutes, English messages in the
forums are translated into German, Spanish and French and German. Spanish and
French messages are translated into English.
Regardless of which language version of CompuServe a user has, the user may
choose whether translated messages in the forums are received in English, German or
French.
Rates
The Internet is pressing commercial service rates. There is a trend away from charging
by the minute or hour. Many services convert to subscription prices, a fixed price by the
month, quarter or year.
Other services, among them some major database services, let users pay for what
they get (no cure, no pay). MCI Mail was one of the first. There, you only pay when you
send or read mail. On IQuest, you pay a fixed price for a fixed set of search results.
Anyone who buys an Internet connection can in principle be a reseller of Internet
access services. This presses the cost of Internet access towards cost. In turn, new
technologies promise to reduce access providers' costs dramatically. They also promise
to reduce the importance of a provider's geographical locations. The users win.
Cheaper transfers of data
Privatization of the national telephone monopolies has opened further for more
alternatives. Possible scenarios:
Free access to the Internet in exchange for receipt of advertisements.
In 1998, several organizations began offering free Internett access in
countries such as Denmark, Sweden, United Kingdom.
Major companies selling extra capacity from their own internal networks,
Telecommunications companies exporting their services at extra low prices,
Other pricing schemes (like a fixed amount per month with unlimited usage),
New technology (direct transmitting satellites, FM, etc.)
Increased global competition will press end users' communications costs down toward
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