Walmart gave up in its fight in the DVD-rental-by-mail market. NY Times' judgment: the future of information delivery will be digital and the rental-by-mail business will not exist for long.

The big retailer's decision to abandon the field to Netflix says something about many other businesses that depend on the delivery of information in some physical format. Newspapers, books and magazines, for instance, are still delivered on paper, but eventually many publishers are likely to dispense entirely with paper and ink to deliver materials electronically, to readers who are freed from their desks by wireless networks and portable magazine-sized tablets with vivid screens. There have been several false starts, but the long-term trend is nonetheless clear.

THAT doesn't mean that paper and discs have no future, but it's not a very bright one when it comes to transmitting news, information or entertainment. The day may come when not only DVD's by mail but traditional mail itself becomes obsolete. If some of us can make do with mobile phones, dispensing with land lines altogether, is it so far-fetched that some day people won't even bother to have mailboxes? Paper junk mail, ghettoized to a postal system that carries little else, may go the way of telegrams, leaving delivery services to focus on packages that require physical delivery. You can't download a shirt, after all.

That day hasn't yet arrived, but maybe the folks at Wal-Mart know something that the rest of us only pretend to know: if it's data, it will move over the Internet. And maybe, just maybe, it's time to stop pretending otherwise.