ABSTRACT
Information is a commodity. The role of information businesses (creators, collectors, vendors and distributors) will become increasingly important in the coming years. This will be particularly true for advanced economies which are dependent on the service rather than manufacturing industries. The UK economy, for example, is already heavily dependent on this type of commerce. It is likely that the World Wide Web (WWW) protocol and the Internet infrastructure will play a central role in information transactions. A recent study predicts that the on-line travel market alone will be worth $9 billion within the next five years (Gardner, 1997) and it is suggested that approximately $2 billion worth of research and development on new Internet access services will be carried out by the private sector this year alone (Hertzberg, 1997). That the Internet should be so important is not surprising, when it is considered that the number of Internet users is predicted to grow to over 100000000 within the next 10 years (Cerf, 1993).
