One of the biggest questions regarding the future of the Internet is the effect that commercialisation will have. Very few businesses have yet made a success of trading on the Internet; even those that are successful, such as amazon.com, still only make small profits. Many businesses fail to realise that Internet commerce is unlike any other way of doing business. Most of the large multinationals have tried e-commerce, but have seen merely as another branch of their traditional business, and have found that they generate little interest or sales. Why is this?

Where there has been success in e-commerce, there is always an element of interactivity and personalisation. For example, Amazon will continually suggest possible purchases, based on your browsing of other products and your past purchases.

Other successes include sites such as http://www.ebay.co.uk/eBay, which is really a service provider rather than an e-commerce business. Here, the site acts as an intermediary, allowing individual buyers and sellers access to a global marketplace. The nature of globalisation means that even obscure and seemingly unwanted objects have a market if offered to a wide enough audience; eBay is effectively a car-boot sale with millions of people wandering through.