Bracing for a nose dive, er, Net dive Analysis/Commentary In recent weeks the techno sector has learned to worry, and to hate the Net. Wall Street slumps in advance of profit losses by industry leaders like Oracle, Sun, Hewlett Packard, and -- yes -- even Cisco; and the dot-coms are still going bust at an alarming rate. Is the Net due for a nose dive? Good question. Paradoxically, business people are some of the least progressive individuals. Fortunately, science has until now presented them with airtight cases. Industry isn't too hard to understand, nor are chemicals, plastics, or consumer electronics. In many ways, businesses that do well have done well since the time of the Egyptians, and don't require an extensive understanding of technology. They simply use the old quid pro quo (something for something) of unfurling products in front of googoo-eyed consumers -- or the "fresh haul of fish" theory of wealth creation. Even the movies, radio, and TV are no-brainers. Now the Net. For three years, businesses have pumped money into the Net without ever having a clear understanding of how to make that money turn over. Consumers were out there at one remove, neither as docile and trusting as TV's couch potatoes, nor as animate as live bodies. As a TV generation, still psychologically trussed up to believe it could be told what it wanted, the public failed to make up its mind to click-and-buy, and many businesses burned through their investments before they could solve the failure to communicate. There's even pause to wonder whether parts of the Net are going to become zones of blight or devastation, the intermediate areas of a city that has grown outward, leaving behind concentric rings to fall on bad times. These are the mean streets, abandoned by commerce, that fall into the hands of the inner city poor, or lay blackened and crumbling, utterly abandoned. You have to wonder: Who's going to clean up the Web in the aftermath of the 2001 shakeout? Will businesses turn to technologies that bypass the public Web -- company-wide broad-bandwidth, or virtual networks that use proprietary routers and circumvent the World Wide Web? Will the Net be abandoned to government, pornographers, and hackers? (In a sense, pornographers are as endangered as the dot-coms.) Will the Net be abandoned to the likes of David Morrock and Mike Alix? March 21, 2001