The Web is everywhere, soon you will be able to interact with your TV, play games across cities, states, borders with none of the limitations of today's bandwidth. Soon you will be able chose which sit-com, news, or drama programs you want to watch and when. You will be able to access every video in Blockbuster with the touch of a button. With Virtual Spaces and the convergence of VRML 2.0 soon we will have the three dimensional world chronicled by Science Fiction writers, movies, and television shows. You will be able to interact with Avatars as realistic and lifelike as their human controllers, in places you will never be able to go in real life, distant worlds, ocean bottoms, miniscule spaces. You will interact with smart-bots having sophisticated artificial intelligence, personality and wit, never guessing that the only place they have life is in their home on a far off server.
Ah, but the web is limited. Right now you can play some popular shoot 'em up games like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem3D, or Activision's Mechwarrior. Being able to taunt your enemy as wax them is fun but you still have the added problem of lost modem connnections, incompatabilities, lost packets, lag time, and network traffic. Play can go from choppy and playable to no fun at all. If only the Internet was faster. We all sigh and hope.
As for all the claims of interactive Video links all over the world through the Internet, direct satelite feeds from distant shores, programming on demand, music on demand, bigger faster, better, more... well, folks we ain't there yet. Maybe we'll never be, because the Web was designed to facilitate only ASCII text (the codes that make up the letters you see on you computer screen), the tightest smallest, most efficient way to send information available. With ASCII you can fit a work of about 240,000 words in the space of one single lowly floppy disk nearly 1000 pages of text.
Which brings me to a point. In America we are media powered, that is everything new must be applied to media.
As Americans we tend to forget that outside of borders there exists a world that is quite different than ours.