With digital cash, merchants never see customers' credit-card numbers -- an important advantage, according to Cybercash marketing vice-president Magdalena Yesil. "In the 3D world," she says, using the hackers' term for noncomputerized life, "a lot of credit-card fraud comes from bad merchants. That would be especially true on the Internet, where there are no bricks and mortar, and the merchants would be apt to appear and disappear." And all Cybercash transactions are encrypted, making it hard for hackers to sniff them.
Lytle believes that digital-cash schemes will ultimately succeed for transactions that involve small sums of money. But transactions with larger sums, in his view, will always run up against the inherent risk of putting personal information on the Net. That risk, he says, "represents a kind of price that people will have to be willing to pay. Add that to the real likelihood of having to pay for the service, and you have to wonder how many people will continue to find value in it." Even today, he notes, few people are willing to pay long-distance charges to order from catalogs.
"My fundamental belief," Lytle says, "is that until the Internet platforms provide a predictable experience, there's not much value to the consumer." The very openness, accessibility, and anonymity of the Internet work against the predictability that is essential to business. "You can go to the real mall, where there are stores like McDonald's and Home Depot that are familiar to you. Or you can go to the virtual mall, where there are 50,000 stores that might be great, or else they might rip you off and disappear. A lot of people don't want the adventure -- they want to go to Home Depot and know they can get the rake they need. On the other hand, making the Internet easier to use by closing it off to everybody but Home Depot would just about kill it. Either way, you're in trouble."
Not many in the computer world know it, but the frustrating trade-offs that bedevil the Internet were anticipated decades ago by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger loathed science and technology, but he knew a lot about the dilemmas of existence. One of the principle insights in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is that people's worst problems are always created by their best features. Heidegger applied this insight to matters of life and death, but it also pertains to more lowly matters like computer networks. The Internet is exciting because it promises to create a future in which every part of the world will have instant access to every other part. People in Manhattan will be able to teleconference with people in Manila while inspecting information about sales from Milan. After the workday they will click on music videos from a salsa database in Mexico City and shop for the latest fashions from Mozambique. And who could resist such a picture? No one -- and that's the problem.
To avoid being swamped, Internet providers will have to make somebody pay for the usage. Maybe not downloading users, but uploading vendors. They've resisted doing this so far, and with good reason. If I have to pay a fee, I'm not going to use the Internet for my music; I'll put on a CD. Vendors, manufacturers, and service providers may induce me to use the Net by picking up the bill. That will doubtless make the system more attractive -- I'll listen to my music on the Internet after all. But when the sponsors of Web pages have to carry the freight, they may think twice about what they are doing. Almost certainly many of the amusing loci about burps and golf swings will disappear. Small businesses may not be far behind, leaving the Internet to the likes of Wal-Mart and Home Depot. Even if a small company chooses to remain on-line despite the higher costs, it will still have to convince me that buying something across the wire is not a foolish act.
None of this guarantees that the Internet will not become what its boosters hope. Eventually -- decades from now, perhaps -- technology will drop the costs to almost zero and ensure security. But until then it will be a tall order for the Internet to preserve its essential features and radically change them at the same time. Unfortunately, one does not have to look very hard to find technological innovations that failed to meet this challenge.
After the CB craze, a relative sold me an old car with a CB attached to the dashboard. I tried it a few times but could never make it through the cacophony of voices. Hoping it would be useful in emergencies, I kept it in the car. But the one time a tire went flat, the friend who had borrowed the car refused to use the CB -- he had heard that distress calls attracted people like Dave from Texas. When the radio was stolen, I didn't bother reporting the theft to the police.
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Charles C. Mann is a contributing editor in science at the Atlantic Monthly . His most recent book, Noah's Choice (written with Mark Plummer), came out in February.
FOUR WAYS TO LIMIT YOUR RISK ON THE INTERNET
The Internet has the potential to be a remarkable tool for business. But unlimited access by users of all stripes raises some serious issues. If you're looking to play it absolutely safe on the Net . . .
1.Don't go overboard with your investment. Expect any revenues you generate to be a very small part of your business for the foreseeable future.
2.Be prepared to deal with hordes of browsers or to inconvenience your customers by requiring passwords.
3.Assume anything you send or expect to receive could be intercepted.
4.Don't ask for credit cards
