By Tiernan Ray  If, as George Bernard Shaw said, democracy ensures a government only as good as its citizens, perhaps the current faults of the Internet lie in our own shortcomings as Internet users. Sure, the high price of broadband access is attributable to the obscure machinations of telephone lobbyists, but we have only ourselves to blame for the fact that we can't do neat things like exchange our business cards or calendars over the Web, or chat with anyone we like.

Things like instant messaging and the vCal standard for Internet calendaring don't have the widespread adoption they should have. In that sense, they have failed. And it's all because in our rush to build a dot-com world, we forgot about the Internet's first premise, to connect everything. It's time to re-examine our priorities and put some muscle behind the open standards that guarantee connectivity.

more...

05 March 2003  |   permalink