Post Script: "Conquering The Internet"

The big story in the other media this morning was, amidst much happy chatter about browsers, portals and dollars, this question: Who would dominate the Internet? AOL or Microsoft? Where Do You Want to Hide Today?

"Conquering the Internet," was the headline in today's New York Times. With its proposed purchase of the Netscape Communications Corporation, reported the paper, America Online, the nation's largest-on-line service "hopes to beat the Microsoft Corportation for dominance of on-line media and electronic commerce."

For years, journalism either ignored the Internet or portrayed it as a haven for hackers, perverts and thieves. Once the world realized how big the bucks might be in those digital hills - Net commerce would reach $3.2 trillion by 2003 -- online commerce instantly became an even bigger story than Johnny stumbling onto the Playboy website.

If some people online struggle to see the Netscape-Sun-AOL merger in anything but technical terms, journalists are seeing only dollar signs and business implications. I got more than a dozen calls from reporters yesterday as a result of my posting on Slashdot about my view of Netscape's absorption by AOL and every one of them wanted to know who would "win" the fight between AOL and Microsoft for control of the Internet.

If I found the question horrifying, they found it mesmerizing.

I told each one the story wasn't about business or portals or browsers, really, but about bigness and the question of whether the Internet could remain as free and open as it is now.

That was irrelevant, said one Net reporter who was on a radio talk show with me, "it's all about catalogues now." I said these companies are too big, too powerful, too invasive. Nobody can compete with them, and they are viscerally exposed to the kind of free discussion that has characterized the Internet up until now. But I was out of sync. Nobody wanted to talk about that. Which company was in a better position? Who's going to end up as the biggest portal? Who would dominate? Which browser would ultimately prevail?

I have no idea, and it's almost besides the point. If these companies prevail, the Internet will eventually go the way of our snoozy, corporatized brothers offline. How happy I would be to be wrong, and how soon we'll know if I am.

Hynotically, one could almost see the new paradigm shaping up right under our noses, the big Net story for the next five years. Gates vs Case, the Geek Visionary against the Main Street Business Whiz. From the Monica Lewinsky story to control of the Internet, our media now sees everything as a kind of NFL match-up. Starr vs. Clinton. Gates vs. Case.

This is turning out to be even worse than it appeared yesterday.

There was some chatter in the papers and on TV and radio this morning about the culture clash between Netscape and AOL, but that will be the shortest-lived business story ever. There is no clash. Netscape won't have a culture for very much longer.

The Times headline shouldn't leave much doubt about the merger's significance to the skeptics who think it shouldn't matter that much, or the techno-savvy who think they can get around it.

"Dominance of on-line media and electronic commerce" isn't very ambigious.Microsoft and AOL are now in a race to "dominate" the culture and business of the Web, and at the moment, all that stands between them and their dreams are millions of talented but not very organized geeks who are making their own software and giving it away. Which of these worlds do you want to live in?

Even a few years ago, the idea that the Internet was about to be conquered by one of two greedy, powerful corporations would have seemed insane. This morning, the country's most influential paper thinks its only a question of which one gets to do it.

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