Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Block those pundits: AOL-Netscape isn't like an NBC of the Web -- and can't be.
Dec 1, 1998 | Like witnesses to some rare cosmological event in the night sky, observers of the America Online-Netscape merger deal last week could barely contain their awe. We are privileged, they told us, to be alive at a wondrous moment -- the formation of the Internet's very own equivalent of a TV network.
Reed Hundt, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman, told the Wall Street Journal, "In the Internet space, this combined company is the equivalent to NBC and ABC merging." Similarly, venture capitalist Ira Machefsky gushed to the San Francisco Examiner, "This is massive -- what you're witnessing is the birth of an NBC on the Internet."
All this network-speak may serve as convenient pundit shorthand to explain to people that, shucks, this is important stuff. But the lazy reliance on imagery and comparisons drawn from the last media revolution serves only to further muddy the already cloudy public understanding of what this latest Internet-biz frenzy portends.
AOL's purchase of Netscape for $4 billion in madly inflated stock is likely to boost the company's overall share of Web traffic or "eyeballs." Netscape's new, well-heeled owners will doubtless keep its browser alive and kicking, though AOL says its service will continue to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer software. (In exchange, Microsoft puts AOL software and an AOL icon on every new Windows PC, and why would AOL want to scotch that sweetheart deal?) The newly merged company's alliance with Sun Microsystems might even speed the arrival of consumer-friendly "Internet appliances" -- cheap devices that bypass the Microsoft-monopolized personal computer and bring the Web to the 60 percent of the U.S. population that has so far resisted its allure. (Microsoft already owns one such device and service, WebTV.)
If we must view AOL as a nascent "NBC on the Internet," then it became one long before it gobbled up Netscape -- back when it trounced its venerable rivals, Prodigy and Compuserve, in the proprietary online business, then did an about-face and transformed itself into the world's largest flat-rate Internet service provider.
But to call this deal the equivalent of "the birth of an NBC" is to misunderstand the nature and history of both television and the Internet. TV evolved almost exclusively as a commercial medium, adopted and promoted by commercial broadcasters; idealistic experiments in public-access cable came much later and never made much of a dent in the public consciousness. The essential nature of the Internet and the Web is that they are "open platforms" that evolved in a non-commercial research environment and took off among avid hobbyists and scientists long before marketers had ever heard of them.
Participation is in the Internet's DNA. Anyone can build a Web site; the tools are free or nearly so, the "how to's" are easy to find -- and today even the hosting space can be had for free, thanks to companies that have built whole businesses by selling ads in "build your own site" communities. With a do-it-yourself site, you can run a small business, contribute to the Web's vast pool of information, express yourself and have a blast.
The one thing you probably won't do is make a fortune. Yet the people obsessed with the AOL-Netscape deal gauge the health of the entire Net exclusively by that one yardstick. And the only way they can imagine the Net as a vast profitable business is for leading Web companies to coalesce into the Internet equivalent of TV networks. AOL's purchase of Netscape provides the perfect moment for them to say, "Look, see, it's happening -- we'll all start making money any day now!"
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Get Salon in your mailbox!