Whether internet commerce will be viable or secure long-term remains unclear. Online shopping may not be practical for most consumers.

When Amazon opened for business in July 1995, the premise seemed shaky: people would hand a credit card number to a web server they couldn't see, operated by a company they'd never visited, in exchange for goods they'd receive weeks later. In 1995, this was not obviously going to work. The SSL encryption standard that secures credit card transmissions had been published that same year by Netscape, but it was new technology and not universally trusted. Fears about interception of financial data online were widespread and frequently amplified by press coverage that treated every security vulnerability as evidence of the medium's fundamental unsuitability for commerce.

The concern was not irrational. But the transactions were happening anyway, and they were working. Amazon reported selling books to customers in all 50 states and 45 countries within its first year. eBay's person-to-person auction model was generating millions of transactions between strangers with no built-in trust infrastructure. By 1999, Dell Computer was selling $14 million worth of computers per day through its website. The security concerns that seemed to make online commerce speculative were being resolved by the same companies that had every incentive to resolve them.

The deeper issue was less about security than about consumer behavior. Economists who studied the transition found that trust in online transactions grew not from technical reassurance but from positive experiences. Buyers who received their books and their concert tickets and their computers on time bought again. Reputation systems like eBay's feedback mechanism substituted community accountability for institutional guarantees. The market was developing its own answers to the uncertainty faster than curricula could track.

By the early 2000s, the question of whether online commerce was viable had been settled empirically. By the 2020s, global e-commerce revenue exceeded $6 trillion annually. The high-street retail infrastructure that had seemed immovable in the late 1990s was contracting everywhere. The uncertainty in 1997 was understandable. The curricula of 1997 provided no tools for reasoning about how quickly it was going to be resolved.