Robert_Charlton - 5:54 am on Jun 2, 2001 (gmt 0)

Earlier this evening, I heard a Commonwealth Club public radio broadcast with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page... short speeches followed by Q&A, on the future of the internet. I thought it was worth the hour, not so much for hard information as for the feeling I got about these guys and where they think it's all going (I'm not talking about Page Rank).

They come across as people you're really happy are running a search engine. The most important point, I felt, was probably by Page, who said: "I believe information access and communications will become truly ubiquitous. That means that anyone in the world will have access to any kind of information they want or be able to communicate with anyone else instantly and for very little cost." He hoped for a subscription model of something like $20 a month for all content, with payments going to content creators using a model similar to what's used with music on radio now. He also gave a fanciful example of how he envisioned that search technology might eventually be interfaced with the real world on portable computers, making neon signs obsolete.

There's a fairly uninformative printed excerpt on the Commonwealth Club website here [commonwealthclub.org], and there's a Real Audio archive, I think of the whole speech, and also the Q&A session here [commonwealthclub.org].

Commonwealth club is [url=www.commonwealthclub.org]www.commonwealthclub.org[/url] --