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Recently in Salon Technology

Digital dad
I thought the Net belonged to my generation, until my father surprised me with his start-up.
By Janelle Brown
[01/13/00]

No sex please, we're geeks
They've got money, power and huge hard drives, so why aren't Silicon Valley's finest getting any?
By Paulina Borsook
[01/12/00]

The Net on AOL's Time Warner deal
Will the new colossus change the Internet for better or worse?
By Janelle Brown, Damien Cave and Lydia Lee
[01/11/00]

Column
AOL and Time Warner's marriage of insecurity
Fear drove the two companies into bed with each other. Now it's our turn to be afraid.
By Scott Rosenberg
[01/10/00]

Technology: View from the top
Market makers
Andrew and Thomas Parkinson opened the first online grocery store a decade ago. Now they're reveling in a flood of Peapod competitors.
By Andy Dehnart
[01/10/00]

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First libertarian theorist Peter Huber cheered "the beginning of the end of the old mass media" and declared that this deal was "far bigger than what happened before in Gutenberg's, Marconi's and Bell's old galaxies." The "analog stragglers," Huber thundered, are "history."

Then columnist Holman Jenkins expressed doubt that the deal would even hold together -- and if it does, that it represents "the last crazy Internet valuation" and a pop to the "Internet bubble."

Then Red Herring editor Anthony Perkins applauded the merger and declared AOL boss Steve Case to be "a strategic genius with a capital G" for trading in his company's inflated stock for the more tangible assets of Time Warner.

Then author Michael Lewis declared there were "no good reasons" for AOL to buy Time Warner -- and that in a decade the whole "obscenely large" conglomerate would be broken up into its component corporate atoms.

It's good to see the experts have such a handle on these important stories.

Whether the deal is a Good Thing depends, of course, on your definition of good, which depends on where you sit. The financial press spilled gallons of ink assessing who outsmarted whom in the merger chess game. If, like me, you own no stock in either company, that won't hold your attention for long.

From a different direction, the media critics came out in force to make the obvious and irrefutable point that the merger would further concentrate the ownership of media in a small number of corporate hands. But they had trouble nailing down exactly how the deal would hurt public access to news and information.

Neither the horse-race handicappers nor the media-monopoly hand wringers focused on the issue that matters most to Internet users like me, and those of my readers who've corresponded with me this week. They and I still harbor hope for the Internet as a new medium with an unprecedented openness, diversity of voices and populist power -- a global Speaker's Corner that gives millions of individuals the chance to reach millions of other individuals and to choose their sources of information from a vast newsstand.

This openness is a direct result of the way the Internet and its underlying protocols were designed over the past three decades by engineers and computer scientists who wanted to enable communication in new ways. The technical choices that guarantee this openness at the heart of the Net's technology -- decentralized packet routing, an emphasis on transparency over security, a "many-to-many" rather than "one-to-many" architecture -- are the very same factors that tend to trip up big corporations that wish to bend the Net to traditional marketing ends or use it to replicate the old-fashioned relationships of broadcast media.

Over the past decade, the geeks and the marketroids have struggled for the soul of the online world -- and so far, the geeks have won. The Internet itself is their baby, and it has triumphed over all the also-ran closed networks that dismissed it as "too complicated" and "too scary" for the average Joe. But the marketroids have roared back over the past five years in an effort to bend the Net into a compliant shape.

The only question that really matters this week in the wake of the AOL-Time Warner deal is whether it can tip the balance in this continuing tug of war.

With AOL's free-disk carpet-bombers now on the same team as Time Warner's book- and music-club promoters, the new corporate colossus is the ultimate marketroid machine. Others have failed to fence in the Net; can it succeed?

Or, as some of my e-mail correspondents put it, as long as we can still go where we want and do what we want on the Net, why should we care what AOL-Time Warner does?

Next page | We eavesdrop on the AOL Time Warner boardroom for a peek into the glorious corporate future