WWW95: opening session

welcome notes

amongst the persons who welcomed the attendees of the 3rd WWW conference were detlef krömker, the conference chair and director of the fraunhofer institute, which hosted this event, and the director of the development department of the german PTT telecom. the later admitted, that the traditional telecom provider ignored the existence of the Internet until recently. now, as the monopoly gets broken up, the governmental telecom organizations start to become service providers to the Internet community, or as he said: "the traditional telecom provider move from ignorance to business partners".

the ministerpresident of the bundesland hessen welcomed the WWW95 attendees as well. he explained why the area around darmstadt has become very popular to the computer industry. according to the ministerpresident, one of the major keys to that success are the well developed information highways in this area. he thinks that well functioning information services may help to protect and preserve natural resources. on the other hand, he wonders what influences such services may have on the society, e.g. by introducing new types of jobs (telejob).

europe's way to the information society

the keynote speech was held by walter de backer, chief advisor, CEC directorate general XIII:

he stated the G7 principles:

competition
private investigation

which basically means that the governmental monopolies will disappear and will be replaced by private service providers.

mister de backer expects a new market structure where users buy services instead of systems. he also stated that automation is just job-killing and that we therefore need to find new activities. he proposed the formation of a information society forum.

finally, mister de backer sees three converging universes:

switching (phone)
broadcasting (radio,TV)
routing (computing)

during the conference, it became obvious that this merging process is already in progress.

back to WWW95 main document

opening_session / 24-apr-95 (ra) / reto ambühler

!!! Dieses Dokument stammt aus dem ETH Web-Archiv und wird nicht mehr gepflegt !!!
!!! This document is stored in the ETH Web archive and is no longer maintained !!!