What's in a domain name? The Washington Post headline sounded alarming: "Network Solutions Dropped as Registrar of Internet Domains." If the small company in Virginia that currently hands out domain names has been "dropped," who will pick up the ball? Will domain-name chaos ensue? The story, it turned out, was not nearly so precipitous or calamitous: What happened was that the National Science Foundation, which gave Network Solutions a contract to run the domain-name business through April 1998, announced that it was not renewing the old contract -- and not giving out any new ones. On the eve of an international conference in Geneva to deliberate over domain-name service (DNS) authority, the NSF announcement was less a bombshell than a confirmation of an already existing state of near-anarchy. Players in this free-for-all include Network Solutions (which claims full authority over the widely used and coveted .com domains), the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC, which has proposed seven new top-level domains like ".firm" and ".store" and a lottery to add 28 independent registries for them), international telecommunications boards, private Net businesses and, of course, the U.S. government. The conflict among these groups is important but dense, a bureaucratic and technical swamp full of numbing acronyms. Behind it may lie another and potentially more ominous story that doesn't seem to be getting much attention. According to Gordon Cook, editor and publisher of the Cook Report newsletter, the DNS battle is far less important than a less-well-publicized but more technologically central conflict looming over IP number assignment. IP numbers -- the 12 digits that identify every computer on the Net -- are the Internet's real addresses; domain names are just aliases or pointers that sit in front of the numbers and make the Net a (little) bit easier to navigate. If Cook is right, we should be seeing a lot fewer headlines about domain names and a lot more about the less sexy but more fundamental IP numbers. Today, the final authority for IP number assignment resides with an obscure body known as the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA), which operates out of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California and is run by Jon Postel, a computer scientist who was one of the Net's pioneers. But Cook says that IANA and Postel have been left vulnerable in the current environment of bureaucratic infighting and legal jockeying. Postel's and IANA's authority derives from custom and from a contract between DARPA, the Federal agency that funded the Internet's early development, and the ISI. Cook says that since that contract expired on April 1 and was not renewed, IANA is vulnerable to the first bad court decision to come down the pike. Here's his nightmare scenario: Say a lawsuit gets brought against Postel or IANA by a company that wants to run its own set of domain names or IP numbers, in competition with the existing authorities. Say the suit comes before a judge who's not particularly friendly to Internet tradition or educated in Internet technology. Asks Cook: "What's gonna happen when a judge says, 'I don't see any legal authority for Postel to do what he's doing. I mean, "The consensual authority of the Internet community"? I beg your pardon, what's that?'" The result could be chaos: "If anybody can put anything in the root servers, then domain name service will eventually break." What does this mean in practical terms to the average user? If domain name service "breaks," every Web address you type in your browser, every bookmark and every link would give you the same error message: "Unable to locate the server. The server does not have a DNS entry." Every e-mail you send would be returned to you as undeliverable. The Net as we know it would crash. IANA is "the linchpin of the Internet," in Cook's words, and it's "floating on air" right now. Disaster, it turns out, may be almost as imminent as the Washington Post suggested -- but for very different reasons than the paper reported.
Bipolar media disorder We're all familiar with the manic-depressive cycle of Internet media coverage -- you know, the accelerating oscillation between "The Net will change everything!" and "The Net's just a big bunch of baloney." But it would be hard to find an illustration of these ups and downs more rapid or extreme than in Newsweek over the last two weeks. The April 14 issue brought us a "Focus on Technology" story headlined, "What Shakeout? Don't believe the anti-hype about making money on the Internet." Steven Levy's article offered a thoughtful and thorough argument that the young Web business is in better shape than recent stories suggest. His Exhibit A was Net bookstore Amazon.com, the "shining example" of an online-commerce success story. The graphic centerpiece of the two-page spread: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' head, peering out from between two stockroom bookshelves. Fast forward two weeks: It's April 28, and here's Bezos again, this time standing in an aisle between two stockroom bookshelves. Only this time the headline reads, "Financial Vaporware: Is anybody really making money on the Net?" In this story Exhibit A happens to be Yahoo, but far more space is devoted to dissecting the stock-offering prospectus from Exhibit B, none other than Amazon.com -- which, according to Newsweek's Wall Street editor Allan Sloan, is not nearly as good a bet as some have painted it. Now, a publication's writers certainly don't have to march in lockstep, and it may be that Steven Levy simply assesses the Web business a lot more favorably than Allan Sloan. But aren't Newsweek's editors reading their own magazine? Shouldn't it have occurred to them that their readers might be justifiably confused by a magazine that calls a company a "shining example" one week and "financial vaporware" two weeks later? Even if the editors aren't reading their own magazine, surely the repeat photos would have underscored the problem. Or does the Internet biz move so fast today that editors just assume no one will keep up with their inconsistencies?
Time to Marimba exec: You're "it" There's lots of cool potential in Castanet, the technology that a company named Marimba is developing. Lots of buzz in the Web shops -- that of all the "push" schemes designed to beam information across the Net to your computer, Castanet's channels give "content providers" and consumers the most flexibility and options. If Castanet and its related chunks of Java-based software are as good as some people are saying, it's even conceivable that large numbers of people may actually end up using them. Someday. If that day arrives, it might make sense for a big national magazine to grab Marimba CEO Kim Polese and put her on a list like the "Time 25," on the cover of this week's Time magazine. For the moment, though, Time's choice of Polese is wildly premature, unthinkingly hype-driven -- and, given the language Time uses in awarding the honor, sniggeringly condescending. The "Time 25" criteria are defined thus on the magazine's Web site: "These are people who have accomplished something subtle and difficult. They have got other people to follow their lead. They don't necessarily have the maximum in raw power; instead, they are people whose styles are imitated, whose ideas are adopted and whose examples are followed." It's understandable that Time would want to include a hot Web entrepreneur on such a list. And the ideas Polese and her company are developing have certainly been "imitated" and "adopted" -- by their competitors, if not yet by any significantly large numbers of users. But the software industry has always been ready to embrace waves of cool-sounding ideas unproven in the marketplace. More often than not, such waves crash long before they've reached the general public's shore. In this business, the "subtle and difficult" achievement lies not in snagging magazine coverage -- but in actually getting a wide population to adopt a new product or approach. In that competition, Marimba's Castanet has barely arrived at the starting gate. On some level Time seems to understand how premature its choice of Polese is; its essay on the attractive young executive is full of oddly deflating comments. She is "the most influential Web entrepreneur of this online generation -- that is, the past six months." (Read: Don't pay too close attention; if you come along in another few months, we'll be hyping someone else.) Her time at Sun as part of the Java team brought "Polese to public attention as the engaging human face of what to most was an incomprehensible software product." (Read: She doesn't look anything like the stereotypical geek so we're thrilled to be able to run a picture of her.) It's bad enough that there are so few women in charge in the software industry. But it's even worse when the press takes the few female executives there are and pigeonholes them as "human faces" rather than smart leaders. Time clinches its cluelessness here with its final line about Polese: She "has earned an honored place as the Web's 1997 It Girl." The original "It Girl," of course, was the archetypal flapper Clara Bow, who in 1927's "It" played a lingerie shop girl with an indescribable quality of attraction. Bow was a camera-pleasing babe not known for her brains, and her career tanked when the talkies came along. "It Girl" came to be understood as a term to describe this year's model -- the female flavor-of-the-week upon whom the flighty attention of the press has briefly alighted. To use it to describe a woman executive trying to build a serious business is surely a back-handed compliment, if not an outright insult. "Sins" of the tech biz? The online media complain a lot about print and broadcast reports that paint the Internet in a bad light, or distort material found online, or grab unsubstantiated rumors off the Net to prove its unreliability. Such complaints are often merited. Sometimes, though, Web sites perform just as irresponsibly -- hastily grabbing news stories from print and boiling them down into context-free tidbits. Consider the brief story that ran Tuesday on ZDNet, from PC Week Online, under the tantalizing headline "Report: High-tech industry is a virtual Sin City." An account of nude frolics at Microsoft HQ? A review of a pornographic urban simulation game? Nope -- just a repurposed story from USA Today about the prevalence of ethical lapses in the U.S. work force. The USA Today piece provided a thorough and detailed report on a study of workplace behavior by the Ethics Officer Association and another industry group of 1,324 randomly chosen workers. Forty-eight percent of workers admitted to "taking unethical or illegal actions in the past year." Like what? By its fourth paragraph, the piece offered these examples: "cheating in an expense account, discriminating against co-workers, paying or accepting kickbacks, secretly forging signatures, trading sex for sales and looking the other way when environmental laws are violated." Nothing unclear there. But when ZDNet picked up the story, it did what local and trade publications like to do: It found "the local angle," zeroing in on a small section of the USA Today piece that found ethical lapses were especially rampant among high-tech workers. Somehow, in ZDNet's hands, this factoid got translated into a repetitious litany of the word "sin" and its variants: "Crime, corruption, moral turpitude ... Who's the most likely to sin?... Why the bull market in sin?" "Sin" is a catchy word. But the story didn't do a very good job of telling the reader what those sins might be. And most of the few it did list -- "cutting corners on quality control," "abusing or lying about sick days" or the absurdly vague "covering up incidents" -- make all that "sin" rhetoric sound a little silly. In any case, the story devoted more space to quotes from an Intel spokesperson denying the quality-control problem than to informing readers about details of the report itself. Print publications have a long tradition of grabbing a story from somewhere, removing a lot of the detail, adding a few quotes and tacking on a jazzy headline. Why should Web-based media be any different? Well, here's one reason: On the Web, unlike in print, it's easy for critics to link back to the original story to show just how sinful a rewrite can be. Times' Internet: Threat or menace? The Heaven's Gate suicides provoked far less anti-Internet paranoia than you might have expected from initial descriptions of the "computer cult" and its Web-design business. It quickly became clear that there were too many dimensions to the cultists' strangeness to pin it all on the Net -- despite some attempts, particularly in the broadcast media, to stir up vague fears of online cult recruiting. Meanwhile, some of the best coverage of the events came on the Net itself, particularly by the Netly News' dogged team, which dug up logs of IRC chats in which cultists actually did try to recruit -- clumsily and unsuccessfully. By far the strangest and most involuted piece of coverage graced the New York Times' Week in Review section cover last Sunday. Under the headline "Old View of Internet: Nerds. New View: Nuts," George Johnson spent a whole column of type describing just how weird and nutty the Net is, and how the Heaven's Gate folks fit right in. The cover illustration was a montage of Web pages from Heaven's Gate itself, from White Power and neo-Nazi organizations, serial killer archive sites -- and a pornography vendor named Nympho.com, featuring a drawing of a busty wench draped over a houseplant. The caption read: "These images from World Wide Web sites, ranging from the merely strange to the truly sinister, may explain why so many people now see the Internet as a menace, a labyrinth hiding the obsessions of perverts and cult leaders trying to snare impressionable minds and bodies." But if you read on to the story's inside-page continuation, Johnson does a sudden about-face: "Never mind that most of the Internet's acreage has been staked and furrowed for ... respectable activities ... In the public mind -- molded by news reports on the old media, which are still more powerful and pervasive than anything online -- the Internet is starting to seem like a scary place ... Real or imagined, such feelings are ripe for political exploitation." Johnson, alas, never actually cites or quotes a single person who finds the Internet scary. His direct line to the terrified "public mind" remains unsubstantiated and suspect; the "many people" who "see the Internet as a menace" are a vacant rhetorical device. On the other hand, members of the public who had no personal experience with the Internet and based their views on the Times' presentation of it in this article would definitely think of it as a public danger. With its compilation of inchoate "menaces" and its "we don't believe this, but lots of ignorant people out there do" dodge, the Times piece is a closed loop of straw men. As for that illustration, we are left wondering what makes Nympho.com strange or sinister, as opposed to merely salacious -- and what the sites of White Power hate-mongerers have in common with the sad and lunatic Heaven's Gate suicides. If Johnson didn't protest so vigorously, you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe the people who blindly "see the Internet as a menace" sit behind Times editors' desks. As a final touch of weirdness, Johnson's article ran next to one of the Times' own house ads for a forthcoming advertorial section that shouted in big type: "The Internet Just Grew Up."
Piling on "push" Media coverage of new technologies is always governed by an inexorable cycle: First comes the hyping, then comes the trashing. Of late, the Net has so accelerated this cycle that the trashing kicks in well before the hype has stopped -- sometimes creating a conflict of views that looks suspiciously like genuine debate. Consider the recent spate of coverage devoted to "push media" -- technologies that aid publishers in sending information to you across the Net rather than waiting for you to come and get it ("pull"). As companies like Pointcast, Marimba's Castanet, Backweb, Intermind and others flock to seize "push" market-share, they have been feted by the business press, welcomed by media companies who hope "push" will help them make money, even lauded by Wired magazine as "the radical future of media beyond the Web." Before any of these companies could even put any of this coverage onto wall plaques or begin planning a stock offering, a ferocious counterassault against "push" kicked in, including critiques and satires, all culminating in a one-two punch from the New York Times this week. First, Sunday Magazine columnist James Gleick, noting that "pull" is what attracts people to the Web in the first place, announced that "the failure of push is preordained." Then in Monday's Times Business section, Digital Commerce columnist Denise Caruso explained "how I came to hate push technology." Both pieces are thoughtful, rational looks at the downside of push: information overload, "interruption and salesmanship." "Shoving [information] down our throats does not increase our capacity for information," writes Caruso. "If anything, it engages our gag reflexes." Of course, if you want to read these stories you must hie yourself to the New York Times Web site and look for them (or do something even more radical, like go to the library). If you're already a "push" consumer, picking your news feed from Pointcast offerings like Reuters, CNN and Wired News, you might never hear this side of the argument. CDA coverage slow on the draw Here are most of the relevant facts you could glean from the instant online coverage of yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court hearings on the Communications Decency Act:
But if you wanted to hear more than a handful of sound-bites from the debate, or to get a sense of what's actually going to happen come June or July, when the Supreme Court's final decision on the matter will be delivered, you were out of luck. Of course, it's never too safe to predict what nine cantankerous, independent jurists are going to decide. Most sites didn't even try to handicap the arguments. ZDNet, for instance, painted the proceedings as a shootout --"High noon at Supreme Court as sides stage final CDA duel," its headline read -- but didn't tell us who bit the dust. When in doubt, you can always root for your own team. That's what some news sites friendly to the cause of Internet free speech did. The excitable folks over at the Netly News reported that the Supreme Court justices had "pummeled" the government's lawyers. Wired News took a slightly more sober approach, reporting that the justices "took Clinton administration lawyers to task" and "grilled" them. Late in the day it offered a more in-depth analysis with the headline, "Net Decency Law Looks Like Dead Meat." C|Net's News.com site provided the most thorough and frequently updated coverage on the Web, but even its story didn't provide nearly the level of detail an interested reader would want. The Web is an ideal medium for timely, thorough coverage of complex legal controversies; there's no space limit and awfully little production delay. The CDA arguments were vital to the future of the Web, and online readers have a natural interest in this story. But you wouldn't know that from yesterday's coverage. And if you have to wait 10 or 12 hours for a good report on the Web, you might just as well wait for your newspaper to be delivered. Washington Post: Accuracy. Context. That's what the professional media have to offer us in the age of the anarchic Net, right? But it's precisely in their coverage of the Net itself that our newspapers and TV networks often fall down on the job. It's not only the big stories, like Time's infamous "Cyberporn" cover; it's also the everyday news stories and features that sap one's confidence in the quality of coverage. This week's case in point is a Washington Post story, from Monday, headlined "Interfacing Reality: The Net Isn't Living Up to Its Promise." It's a rambling series of complaints by staff writer Margot Williams about the clumsiness of e-mail, the slowness of the Web and the unreliability of search engines, all supporting the thesis that "the Internet still isn't ready for prime time or the workplace." Williams relies on a handful of anecdotal beefs to buttress definitive conclusions about the Net's lack of value. For instance, she cites her own "inability to get into the office mailbox from home, as our remote access setup excludes Macintosh log-ins" as if it were a problem of the Internet itself and not the result of some poor decision on the part of a Washington Post exec. Yet this snafu becomes evidence for Williams to conclude that "the Internet is not yet a dependable, timely source of public information." The kicker here, though, is the article's complaint that search engines serve up too many outdated, broken links: "Sites that are updated daily (http://www.washingtonpost.com, for example) don't keep old information hanging around. But the search engine indexes seem to keep the pointers there forever." Search engines could certainly be more up-to-date, no argument there. But many "sites that are updated daily" (http://www.salonmagazine.com, for example) are courteous enough to keep their articles online so that links keep working. "Keeping old information hanging around" is precisely what the Web was designed for. Williams clinches her case against the Net by searching for stories by one of her Washington Post colleagues. Half the links are broken, "File Not Found." QED: The Net is no good. Too bad the explanation for those bad links wasn't out on the Net but right in the reporter's own newsroom. Williams doesn't let her readers in on the inconvenient fact that the Washington Post broke those links itself. Apparently preparing to charge money for access to older articles, the Post recently took down all the archives it had built up on its Web site since its June 1996 launch. So with one hand, the Post makes a mess of all the links that other Web sites have gradually built to its own stories -- and with the other, it uses that mess to demonstrate the hopeless unreliability of the Internet. Accuracy? Context? Here's a link to Williams' story. It should be good for at least another week or two.
"60 Minutes": Expunge the Net now! Now that the Web has stepped center-stage as a news medium -- thanks to the Dallas Morning News, which broke its Timothy McVeigh confession story on its Web site last week -- the barrage of attacks on Web journalism's credibility can only escalate. Here are two recent examples. Last Sunday's "60 Minutes" brought its viewers a shocking exposé of the Internet: It turns out that the Net, the Web and particularly Usenet news groups are full of unsubstantiated "facts," opinions, rumors and even lies. Stop the presses! Correspondent Lesley Stahl took a whirlwind Net tour with Internet World editor Andrew Kantor, using search engines to find dubious reports emanating from the likes of J. Orlin Grabbe, a Reno, Nev.-based conspiracy theorist. It seems that wackos like Grabbe can use the Net to "instantly" reach 20 million people. (CBS doesn't do its own credibility any favors by omitting the word "potential" before that 20 million figure, suggesting that Grabbe and his ilk have an automatic mass audience rather than an infinitesimal sliver of total Net traffic.) "Forgery, fakery, falsehoods -- they're everywhere on the Internet!" Stahl concludes. "And rumors are so rampant that cyberspace is becoming a dangerous place, especially for corporate America." Of course, tabloid TV is hard to top for fakery, and you can find plenty of falsehoods on any newsstand (checked out the Weekly World News lately?). The Net is being singled out for demonization because anyone can use it to promote their points of view -- whereas on TV only CBS and its licensed competitors are allowed to do the same. Thus this trumped-up "scoop" about the Net, which conveniently serves the TV networks' own interests. The story is in fact more likely to be valuable to gullible professional journalists like Pierre Salinger than to the general public, which has already learned not to trust the media and has every reason to carry that healthy skepticism online. "60 Minutes" could have used its precious public time to help its viewers understand the spectrum of online credibility and their own role as consumers of the news in evaluating what they hear -- a perspective Kantor gamely tried to offer. Instead, Stahl's outrage left the clear suggestion that we need new laws to protect the public from what the public itself says on the Net: "How is a kid supposed to discern what's true and not true?" Digging through the misinformation on Usenet, Stahl asks, "Shouldn't this be expunged? ... It's wrong. It's inaccurate, it's irresponsible. It is spreading fear and suspicion of the government." Meanwhile, even professional journalists on the Web aren't faring much better in their treatment by their offline colleagues. The latest salvo comes from the Los Angeles Times, where reporter Julie Pitta slammed CNet's News.com site for running a scoop about a merger between Netscape and Novell that "wasn't true." Trouble is, as CNet editor Jai Singh was quick to argue, CNet never said that the merger actually happened; its report simply noted that Novell had been identified as a takeover target by analysts at Forrester research. Pitta wound up using her own misrepresentation of CNet's "scoop" as the hook for a an article-length attack on online technology news operations: "In the zeal for scoring scoops, journalistic ethics are falling by the wayside." As if such behavior were unknown in the print world -- where the L.A. Times distorted this very story in its quest for a good lead.
Someday soon, hopefully, everyone will wake up and realize that journalism can be trustworthy or terrible, and it can be online or offline -- and anyone who attempts to correlate the two characteristics probably has an ax to grind.
Microsoft prefers maxipayments The dream of "micropayments" -- penny-size fees for reading pages or using software tools -- has been one of the enduring ideals of Internet culture. The pioneering blueprints of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, the thriving subculture of shareware entrepreneurs and recent startup ventures like Ideamarket have all been inspired by a similar vision: Make it easy and cheap for people to sell their ideas across computer networks, and you'll unleash a creative renaissance. But hold on -- here comes Microsoft's chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, to tell us why micropayments don't and won't work. Myhrvold has for some time been using Microsoft's Web magazine Slate as a platform to expound his -- and presumably his employer's -- perspective on Internet economics. In his discussion of micropayments, "A Penny For Your Thoughts?" he grants that computers will inevitably continue to reduce "transaction cost" overheads -- a necessary prerequisite for any micropayment scheme to work. (If you're charging pennies a page, you'll lose money if it costs you 25 cents to bill each customer.) He argues that micropayments might work in industries where "products get used up" or where there aren't many repeat customers, but maintains that pay-per-use models are inappropriate for "intellectual property" like writing: They penalize heavy users, "screwing your best customer." He makes a persuasive case for why Slate -- along with other publishers, like Random House, who are contemplating online ventures -- is better off supporting itself through ads or subscriptions than by charging pennies per page. Myhrvold is an articulate commentator, but he has a blind spot as big as a Windows 95 logo. Having proved that micropayments can't support Slate, he concludes that "micropayments will play a very small role in selling Internet content" -- as if well-funded professional magazines on the Net are the only kind of content worth discussing. Yet micropayment visionaries have never viewed their scheme as an additional profit center for giant corporations. The idea has always been to create an opening in the marketplace for the little guy, the amateur, the individual author or inventor -- to allow them to earn some money (not necessarily a living) from their work, without having to first win the nod of some "gatekeeper" at a distribution chokepoint. Maybe this is brilliant and liberating, maybe it's a pipe dream; but Microsoft's inability to support a magazine by adopting it is quite irrelevant.
Microsoft's hobbled competitor Apple has long been criticized for having a "not invented here" mentality, rejecting innovations that didn't emerge in-house. Myhrvold's dismissal of micropayments suggests that Microsoft has what you might call a "not profitable here" mind-set: It's no good if we can't make money with it. That may be sound thinking in business, but it makes for unilluminating journalism. You eat your own words The lead in the Feb. 16 New York Times Book Review's review of John Seabrook's "Deeper" is a thoughtful piece of work: "You are your words" is the epigraph greeting users as they log on to the Well, an electronic bulletin-board system in northern California. Cyberspace remains a territory comprising mostly sentences and phrases, which is why the Well chose to place this admonition as a reminder to its users -- what you write here is who you are."You are your words" is indeed a valuable meditation on the nature of online communication. Alas, the Well's actual log-in greeting is You own your own words, and that means something quite different. It's both a philosophy of taking responsibility for what you say and an attempt on the Well management's part to find some down-to-earth protection from legal liability. The members of the high-profile, pioneering Well community have thrashed endlessly over the meaning and implications of "YOYOW," as they abbreviate the phrase. Often, when mainstream media institutions get a digital story wrong, it's because they're relying on writers who don't know the online turf. But that wasn't the problem here. The author of the review, David Bennahum, runs a newsletter on Internet issues and history called Meme, hosts a conference on Electric Minds and is preparing his own book on a subject similar to Seabrook's. (Contacted for comment, Bennahum will only say that he "regrets the error.") The glaring misquotation looks less like a slip and more like an indicator of deeper misreading as you go further in the review. Bennahum's chief complaint is that New Yorker writer Seabrook fails to engage with his subject, "remaining aloof, refusing to join the natives in their epistolary adventure."
Funny -- I found that to be the book's greatest strength. In the course of the two years his book chronicles, Seabrook goes from rank newbie lurker to conference host and home-page developer. More than any of his predecessors on the print-journalist-tours-cyberspace beat, he has indeed "gone native." And he has certainly engaged deeply enough with the Well to be able to quote its log-in banner accurately.
Wired gets pushy The palm of a ghostly blue hand jumps off the cover of the March Wired and into your face. "We interrupt this magazine for a special bulletin," reads the headline. "PUSH!" The cover continues: "Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web. By the editors of Wired. Remember the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft? Well, forget it. The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance." "Push media" means programs like Pointcast and Marimba's Castanet -- schemes for automating the transmission of content across the Internet, so that instead of you going to a Web site and "pulling" it down to your computer, the content providers "push" their wares out to you. "Push" promises Net companies a new way to begin making actual money -- and threatens to transform the Web into a digital update of the broadcast media we already know so well. It's certainly a major story, and you can't fault Wired for jumping on it. Still, Wired's eagerness to push "push" at us -- not only to cover it but to endorse it so gaudily -- is unseemly, to say the least. You see, the magazine's parent company is itself trying to build new businesses around "push" technologies, with its Wired News service on Pointcast, a new Castanet-based "Wired Desktop" and other ventures. In other words, while one arm of Wired helps build a buzz around a new technology, another arm is all set to try to profit from it. That alone ought to make the front-page-bylined "editors of Wired" shudder. Even worse, the "push" technologies Wired is now telling us are the Next Big Thing pretty much negate all the neat features of the Web that Wired was extolling only a little while ago.
Not too long ago Wired was telling us that the Web was great because it took power away from big-media dinosaurs and put it in the hands of the little guy. Now Wired's saying "good riddance" to the Web. What it's really kissing off is its own credibility. America may be on hold — America Online fought off hordes of angry users and their lawyers over the past two weeks. Users were taking advantage of AOL's new pricing plan, which turned off the service's hourly meter and offered unlimited hours for $19.95 a month. Usage of AOL skyrocketed beyond what the network had predicted, and users started getting busy signals when their modems tried to dial in. As some users grabbed phone lines and wouldn't let them go for fear of not being able to log in again, the problem spiraled, until AOL — threatened by action from various state attorneys general — had to agree to provide angry customers with refunds. It was a big story that newspapers and TV stations understandably jumped on. But in their haste they got two things awfully confused: AOL and the Internet itself. Predictions of "Internet traffic jams" have been bouncing around for so long now that some clueless news editors jumped when they heard about AOL's woes. Here it was — Internet gridlock! And that's how they spun the story. Even the careful New York Times blew its Page 1 headline: "Pushed by States, America Online Agrees to Refunds in Internet Jam," it announced. Now, doubtless, large numbers of AOL's phone-line-hogging users were in fact using the service to access Internet-based Web sites or to send e-mail across the Net to users outside of AOL. But the problem was exclusively with AOL, not the Internet. There was no "Internet Jam"; if anything, the fact that AOL users were having a hard time accessing that network probably reduced a little of the load of Internet traffic. AOL doesn't own enough modems to keep its customers happy right now. That's a problem for AOL, not for the Internet. The Internet has its own long-term traffic concerns, and there are all sorts of efforts underway to improve its infrastructure, increase capacity by adding backbone lines and provide faster, more reliable service. Someday maybe there'll be a real "Internet Jam." And maybe by then the mainstream media will be able to distinguish one kind of network from another.
-- Scott Rosenberg
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