The 10th Annual Gilder | Forbes Telecosm Conference, held October 4-6, 2006 in Lake Tahoe, California, featured an outstanding panel and debate sponsored by the Discovery Institute on the subject of Network Neutrality regulation. Broadband Brawl: A Debate Over Net Neutrality Tod Cohen: Vice-President and Deputy General Counsel, Government Relations, eBay George Gilder, Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute; Editor in Chief, Read More ›
When Bill Clinton assumed office nine years ago, I predicted he would enjoy one of the greatest economic booms in the history of the world. Impelled by the spread of the Internet, the onset of fiber optics, and a tenfold increase in venture capital — unleashed by the lower tax rates and deregulation of the Reagan administration — the Clinton Read More ›
THE CROAK ON THE END OF THE LINE came from a fitness center. Huffing and puffing away on his cellular phone and exercycle was Jim Rogers, famous Alabama hick centi-millionaire motorbiker, Columbia professor of finance, and dreadnought plunger into the world’s most porcupinous stockmarkets and briar-patch bourses. From Botswana to Sri Lanka, Rogers waits till there is blood in the Read More ›
In the early 1960s, working on America’s second-strike capability, Paul Baran conceived the Internet. Now he wants to save the Net itself. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE as an engineer, Paul Baran was “scared stiff.” That can happen to people who stumble too close to the abyss of 20th-century history and look over the edge. Born in 1926 Read More ›
Editor’s note: Four years ago, Forbes ASAP published its first issue with a stunning prophecy by contributing editor George Gilder. Fiber optics, said George, had the potential to carry 25 trillion bits per second down a single strand. This represented a ten-thousandfold leap in carrying capacity over the 2.5 billion bits “barrier” long assumed by most experts in the field. Read More ›
WILL THE INTERNET COLLAPSE? NO WAY! What is all this commotion in Massachusetts? The very source of the Arpanet at Bolt, Beranek & Newman — the cradle of the Internet — Massachusetts is falling to the forces of Auntie Spiker and Aunt Sponge. These are the mingy ladies in the Roald Dahl story who rejoiced in James’s Giant Peach as Read More ›
GOLIATH IN THE VALE of Elah roared his contempt at the weapons and zeal of David: “Do you think me a dog that you contest me with sticks and stones?” Bill Gates, the Goliath of software, sees himself similarly beset by zealous rivals with risible weapons. Entering his modest second-floor office on the edge of the Microsoft campus on a Read More ›
Well, it had to happen. As the Internet emerges as the central nervous system of global capitalism, the Luddite left is bursting into “flames” against the microcosm and telecosm, against interlinked computers and the global radiance of electromagnetic communications. This rising resistance resonates with the press coverage that has long lavished attention on the excesses of the Net. Richard Shaffer Read More ›
Every now and then, timing is all. Take George Gilder’s Aug. 28 Forbes ASAP piece, “The Coming Software Shift.” Lucky Forbes readers got their copies in mid-August, smack between the year’s two biggest technology events — Netscape’s record-hot IPO and the release of Windows 95. Gilder used the timing to explain why creative energy and profits in desk-top software would Read More ›