Forecasting the future is easier when the big technological innovations are in place. In 1897, for example, a far-sighted person could have guessed that the invention of the automobile would change society dramatically in the subsequent centry. The design of the car and its engine have changed many times over the past hundred years, but the basic technology and its potential were already in place. The advances of the past few decades are now converging. Creators and users of technologies such as the Internet, the mobile telephone, and digital television will refine and rearrange thern in many ways in the coming centry, but their broad shape is clear to us. The book began as a survey, also called ""The Death Of Distance,"" that I wrote for The Economist in 1995. The title plays upon The Tyranny Of Distance, Geoffrey Blainey's classic study of the impact of isolation on Australia. After having various conversations with people at the World Bank and reading ""Near-Zero Tariff Telecommunications,"" I realized that the steep fall in the distance premium for communications would be of enormous economic and social importance arround the world. Not surprisingly, most previous analysis of the communications industry has been from an American viewpoint, given American dominance of the Internet. Writing for The Economist, a British manazine based in London, prepares one well for the distance-free world of the future: the readers are scattered about the world, with two-thirds of the circulation in the United States and most is similar to that of the remaining third outside Britain. The perspective of this book is similar to that of The Economist-neither American nor British, but international or multinational.

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