One was a short article in the back pages of
        The Times that reported that the number of
        adults using the Internet in the U.S. had
        surpassed 100 million, meaning that roughly
        half the U.S. population is now online.

        The other article, in The Post, noted that
        Amazon.com was shipping an extraordinary
        number of copies of Adolf Hitler's racist
        manifesto, "Mein Kampf," to buyers in Germany.
        It is illegal to sell "Mein Kampf" in bookstores
        in Germany or publish it there. But as we move
        from the world of Borders books to the world
        of borderless books, a k a Amazon.com,
        Germans can order "Mein Kampf" online and
        have it delivered by mail, and their government
        is powerless to stop it. Indeed, Amazon
        shipped so many copies of "Mein Kampf" to
        Germany that over the summer Hitler made
        Amazon's top 10 best-seller list among German
        buyers.

        What these two little stories tell is that 10
        years after the fall of the Berlin Wall a whole
        other set of walls is starting to fall, as we
        move deeper into the Internet revolution. And
        this is not simply an American phenomenon,
        nor, as the "Mein Kampf" example illustrates,
        will it automatically bring out the best in people.

        So what comes next? With the first phase of
        this wall-destroying Internet revolution -- the
        e-mail and e-commerce phase -- now fully under
        way, I posed that question to John Chambers.
        Mr. Chambers runs Cisco Systems, which
        makes the routers that run the Internet.
        Beware: He has an obvious stake in touting the
        Internet. But note: His past predictions have
        proved extremely accurate.

        Mr. Chambers argued that the second phase of
        the Internet revolution -- businesses absorbing
        the Internet and using it to relate to one
        another -- was now just taking off, and that
        this was going to be a monster market. There
        is barely a C.E.O. in the developed world who in
        the last six months hasn't said to himself: "Oh
        my God! This Internet thing is real. Somebody
        call me an Internet doctor and wire me up."

        Once a C.E.O. understands that absorbing the
        Net into every aspect of his or her business
        "is the only way they are going to survive," said
        Mr. Chambers, "they are going to be spending
        big bucks on it. That's why I believe that Y2K
        will be short-lived, and after that we are going
        to see one of the best years the computer
        industry has ever seen."

        So now that commerce has moved to the Net,
        and the Net is moving into business, what
        comes after that?

        "Education," said Mr. Chambers. "The next big
        killer application for the Internet is going to
        be education. Education over the Internet is
        going to be so big it is going to make e-mail
        usage look like a rounding error" in terms of
        the Internet capacity it will consume.

        What will drive it will be the demands on
        companies, in an intensely competitive global
        economy, to keep improving productivity.
        E-learning, insists Mr. Chambers, if done right,
        can provide faster learning, at lower costs,
        with more accountability, thereby enabling
        both companies and schools to keep up with
        changes in the global economy that now occur
        at Net speed. Schools and countries that
        ignore this, he says, will suffer the same fate
        as big department stores that thought
        e-commerce was overrated.

        If universities move properly, they will offer
        the ideal combination of online and
        instructor-led learning, argues Mr. Chambers.
        But if universities don't reinvent their
        curriculums and how they deliver them, for an
        increasingly Net-driven economy, many
        students, particularly in information technology
        fields, "will go to schools online," he says. Many
        big firms -- Cisco, G.E., I.B.M., AT&T -- are
        starting online academies to train new
        employees and to constantly upgrade the skills
        of existing ones.

        "Unlike in the industrial revolution when you
        had to be in the right country or city to
        participate, in this new era capital will flow to
        whichever countries and companies install the
        best Internet and educational capabilities,"
        says Mr. Chambers. Governments and unions
        will be powerless to stop this capital flow,
        which will affect the global balance of
        economic power. Although the technology
        exists today, this revolution will take about 10
        years to be fully in place. But, insists Mr.
        Chambers, "it's coming next."