Once upon a time, the Internet was a wholly virtual environment, moored only loosely to the physical world. It was where information went to become free, where censorship was routed around, where communities could leap barriers of distance and culture in a single bound . . . and where no one knew you were a dog. The kicker was that these aspects were built into the fabric of the Net, thanks to its origins in military communications research. You couldn’t tie the Net to the real world if you wanted to.

The physical world is making a comeback, even online. With the collapse of the dot-com stock bubble, things like brick-and-mortar storefronts, tangible assets, face-to-face meetings and hard-dollar profits suddenly are fashionable again. Following the same pattern, the foundational assumption that Internet users and sites have no connection to geography is eroding. It’s now possible to determine with high levels of certainty where someone is connecting from. This allows for targeting of services and content, but also raises the possibility that physical-world laws will encroach on cyberspace.

Like it or not, the era when one could confidently speak of the Net as a world apart is coming to a close. Profitability and traditional stock valuation metrics do matter in the end. Napster and MP3.com have been forced to restructure their offerings in response to pressure from the music industry. (Just before we went to press MP3.com was bought by a major record company, Vivendi Universal.) Most, though not all, of the largest retailers, banks and content providers on the Net will be the biggest, most established real-world corporations in those categories.

Download pdf Mapping the Net: Revenge of the Physical World