Perspective: Web dreams will not come true

There are many people who believe that the Internet is such a revolutionary medium that it will, eventually, ?marginalise television and radio, and destroy the activities of video, publishing and sound publishing?. At least that?s the view of industry analyst Robin Bloor.

Bloor believes that the web will ?marginalise the telephone and all activities associated with it?. It will become ?the dominant medium? and ?nothing short of a nuclear war will stop it?.

An extreme view? Well, to paraphrase Al Jolson, you ?ain?t heard nothing yet?.

Bloor also believes that it is more or less pointless for the Conservative Party to worry over the single european currency.

He said: ?It is extraordinary to see the Tory party nailing its short-term political future to maintaining a national British currency, when it is quite clear that even the euro may not survive indefinitely,?

Now why is that, you may ask. Bloor has the answer: ?National currencies have no function whatsoever in the electronic economy,? he said.

So, the web and its child, ecommerce, are not only going to replace television, radio and publishing as we know it, they are going to replace money as well.

All well and good, and perhaps, given enough time, all these things may come to pass. But then, perhaps not.

There are a number of hurdles in the way of all this. Sorry, did I say hurdles? I meant to say fences. And I am talking about fences of Grand National proportions.

First, electronic commerce is not remotely secure. As fast as the IT industry comes up with a way to make web transactions secure, hackers will come up with a way to break the security.

Then take the issue of the web as a publishing medium. It is relatively cheap to publish on the web, and the result is that everyone publishes on the web.

How does anyone make any sense of the consequent noise level and pick out the sound from the static? And just how will the web replace television?

The World Wide Web is already known as the World Wide Wait for a very good reason.

Anyone trying to introduce someone to the Internet for the first time via a dial-up line is asked the same question ? why does it take so long? We already have to wait forever for standard pages and terrible video picture. Are we really going to have video with the quality of digital television down the web any time soon?

And then there is a single, world electronic currency. Forget the euro, says Bloor, the world currency is going to happen anyway.

While I am willing to accept that all the other things that he predicts may happen, eventually, I draw the line at a worldwide single currency.

Getting the governments of the world to sit in one place to sort out the standards will be difficult enough. Many of them will got to war, nuclear if necessary to stop it happening.

It does no harm to dream. As long as you realise you?re dreaming.