Thanks to a group of academic economists from Harvard and Stanford, we now know that the U.S. economy has been in a recession since last March. But despite academia’s confirmation of what most of us had already figured out on our own, the World Wide Web–and by extension the e-commerce business model–is not on the verge of extinction. To be sure, the dot-com bubble burst took a serious toll on scores of 20-something computer science majors, who saw their multi-million-dollar online empires vanish overnight.
But this wasn’t enough by a long shot to extinguish the flames stoking online users’ fervor for Web surfing. By now the Internet has outlived its novelty stage and grown into an indispensable medium for communication. In fact, the Web today is arguably as important to the global conveyance of information as the postal service, fax machines, telephones, radio and television.
