The Internet is Dead : According to Cuban

Mark Cuban
Much like Friedrich Nietzsche, who scandalized 19th-century Europe by declaring that "God is dead," Mark Cuban has some bad news for all the true believers who are investing billions in the Web.

The internet is "dead and boring," Cuban says in an interview with Portfolio.com. "We have reached the point of diminishing returns with today's internet. The speed of broadband to your home won't increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth."

Of course, the 49-year-old Cuban made his $2.3 billion fortune as an internet entrepreneur. In 1999, he and business partner Todd Wagner sold their Web TV company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock, then cashed out before the tech market imploded -- leaving Cuban with plenty of money to buy a basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks; launch a high-definition television network, HDNet; hire Dan Rather; and start a vertically integrated entertainment company, 2929 Entertainment, that makes and distributes movies and owns a chain of theaters.

He apparently still has enough left over to bid on the Chicago Cubs, recently put on the block by the Tribune Co., though he's uncharacteristically mum about his plans. "If I told you I would have to kill you," says Cuban, who last month officially joined the list of prospective buyers by applying to Major League Baseball to examine the team's books. "I'm sworn to secrecy."

Answering questions by email from the Cayman Islands, where he was vacationing with his family and recovering from hip-replacement surgery, Cuban also shared his views on Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo versus Google, day-trading, his personal investment strategy, and why he won't pull the plug on his much-criticized business journalism operation, Sharesleuth.com, in which he shorts companies that the site plans to trash-hoping to turn a tidy profit on his pre-publication insider knowledge.