"Billions of dollars in electronic commerce and the fate of the electronic global community hang in the balance and depend on those decisions."
Very true, the dotcom era of 1997-2000 were driven primarily by the hype on ecommerce, and were driven primarily by virtual companies that came out of the blue to capitalise on the hype. Yahoo, Amazon, eBay were all companies from the blue.
As conservative and elephant heavy bricks-to-clicks start to understand the true technological value of online sharing and communication, you will see real moneyed growth happening.
They do not want to be associated with the broken promises and carnage of the dotcom era. Many companies have just silently taken the word dotcom out of their names.
Very sad.