Ben Parr Quotes
There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009.
Parr, Ben. "Internet 2010 in Numbers." Mashable, 2011.
This is a classic attempt to argue against a technical proposed policy that the Senator did not understand. While most of the new digital companies favored net neutrality, the telephone companies opposed it as they wanted to be able to discriminate among customers in providing Internet access. One of the telephone companies had obtained Steven’s support for the anti Net Neutrality position. They must have explained some technical reasons to him, and this speech was his understanding of the concept. To those who know something technical about the Internet and digital transmission, this is so crude and wrong that it is humorous.
A startlingly bad prediction by a Nobel-prize winning economist particularly given it was stated in 1998 rather than a much earlier date when the potential of the Internet wasn’t already apparent. Ironically, the quote is from a Red Herring article he wrote titled “Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong” in which he asserts that most economists predictions are wrong because they overestimate the impact of future technologies. This quote is part of a longer, equally incorrect quote: “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” See related quotes.
This coined the term “World Wide Web”. The co-author of the document was Robert A Caillau.
Ben Parr is an American journalist, author, venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He is the author of Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention, a book on the science and psychology of attention and how to capture the attention of others. He is the President and co-founder of Octane AI, a marketing automation and conversational marketing company for E-commerce. He was previously a venture capitalist, the co-editor and editor-at-large of Mashable, and a columnist and commentator for CNET. In 2012, he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30.
