The Internet is the future, filled with exciting opportunities and significant challenges, for individuals, financial institutions, businesses of all types, governments, Americans and our counterparts around the globe.  Binding people together personally, professionally and economically—those who engage in buying and selling, learning and teaching, talking and listening—in ways that were not contemplated even a few years ago, and which hold the promise of ushering in a new age and making the world even smaller.

• The Internet is growing faster than all other technologies that have preceded it.  According to the U.S. Commerce Department, it took 38 years before radio had 50 million listeners and television took 13 years to reach that mark.  The Internet crossed the line in just four years.  See also World Internet Usage Statistics & Population Stats.
  
  
• Internet users are becoming increasingly comfortable with making secure credit card and other purchases on the World Wide Web.
  
  
• The Internet—that complex international "network of networks" which interconnects innumerable smaller groups of linked computers—makes it possible for hundreds of millions of people to communicate with one another and rapidly exchange electronic messages, and access vast amounts of information from around the world.  Taken together, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the networks, search engines and the like constitute the unique medium known as Cyberspace—located in no particular geographical location but available to anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to the Internet.

The Web is thus comparable, from the user's standpoint, to both a vast library including millions of readily available and indexed publications and a sprawling mall offering goods and services.  From the point of view of a Web publisher, or a site's owner, it constitutes a platform from which to address and hear from a worldwide audience of billions of readers, viewers, researchers, buyers and sellers.  Any person or entity with a computer connected to the Internet can publish information today, and the future seems virtually limitless.

Despite the Internet's unprecedented growth, it has been said that the "Information Superhighway" of today is still a "dirt road" when compared to where it will go in the future.  As the Internet develops, so will the laws, legislative proposals, litigation and regulation relating to it:

• Debate continues worldwide concerning what entities will administer and regulate domain names, and how to deal with them as they continue to grow rapidly.
  
  
• Important issues such as Internet privacy and security, and the permissible uses of encryption products, will increase.
  
  
• Internet tax proposals at the federal and state levels, and similar government tax and tariff proposals abroad—now and in the future—could stifle the growth of this new technology.   Other plans to regulate the Internet are also receiving increased attention from governmental entities around the world.
  
  
• Litigation—involving contract disputes; trademark and copyright infringements; fraud and deceit; misleading and deceptive practices; wrongful appropriation, registration and use of domain names; unfair competition; violations of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Economic Espionage Act of 1996; and state computer crimes acts and the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, as well as other federal and state laws—is expected to mushroom in the years to come.

Timothy D. Naegele & Associates is prepared to serve your business and individual needs, involving these and other issues.  Whether the matter concerns Internet commerce, applicable laws and court decisions, legislative activities, contractual matters, or the resolution of disputes through litigation or other means, we stand ready to serve both our American and foreign clients in Cyberspace!