It's the End of the Web as We Know It
Used for shopping, communication, business, and anything else we can imagine, the internet is an indispensable tool for over a billion people worldwide. It is difficult for many to imagine it working differently, but that is exactly what researchers in Europe, the US, and Japan hope to accomplish.
"The internet is reaching its limit," says Yoshihrio Onishi, assistant director at the Japanese Communications Ministry. Though the US and Europe have been working on making a new superhighway a reality for some time, Japan has just recently thrown its hat into the ring.
When the web was conceived in the late sixties and early seventies, a widespread phenomenon of portable devices with net access was the stuff of science fiction. Computers were expected to remain stationery, and the internet to be used by a select few scholars and researchers. The architects of the web, for the most part, knew each other.
