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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]

Column
The wrong stuff
In the future, predictions of the future will be as off-base as they've been in the past.
By Scott Rosenberg
[01/07/00]

A hair-raising scheme
Luring fans to "go with the Flowbee," the vacuum-powered star of late-night infomercials caters to its online community.
By Damien Cave
[01/06/00]

The love machines
We test-drive the new, Internet-based, remote-controlled sex toys -- so you don't have to.
By Tricia Baldwin
[01/05/00]

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Old-time Net heads and Web business people quickly focused on the big issues raised by the big merger. Will independent voices still have room to thrive on an Internet increasingly dominated by huge corporations? Will this merger dumb down the Net? How open will this new-old media powerhouse make its content and its network? Will AOL-Time Warner -- or anyone -- figure out how to make broadband work?

We surveyed a number of geeks, new-media savants and technology critics to get their take on the century's biggest mega-merger (at least so far). Here's what they had to say:

Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of Times Company Digital, the Internet unit of the New York Times Co.

It's great for those of us who go back to the earliest days of AOL, back when they were Quantum Link with a service that ran over 300-baud modems for Commodore computers. Who would have thought that they'd be taking over Time Warner?

AOL was always a great company, fast and nimble, even before it was fashionable to be fast and nimble. It followed the PC into the marketplace, invented consumer e-mail and popularized chat and buddy lists. It always followed the user -- it never tried to overlay standards on users that they weren't ready for.

Also Today Bigger, fatter, richer Inside the Time Warner media empire there was a whole lot of smiling going on Monday. By Sean Elder 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

You'd hope to see some new forms of programming. Not entertainment programming per se, but interesting tie-ins between broadcast and PC, where AOL-TV tied into Time Warner content. And of course, there's that dirty old word, "synergy," between AOL's news channel and CNN-- but that's not all that earth-shattering. I don't see the merger as less choice for consumers. After all, this isn't a consolidation of traditional media companies -- this is a click-and-brick story.

What I really hope is that the merger will motivate a broadband revolution. That's speaking in hyperbole, but I'd love to see someone deliver a really great user experience in broadband. No one's done it so far, and if AOL can take its experience to Time Warner's Road Runner, that would be great.

Jamie Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology

The current system -- you get a pipe from your ISP and you do what you want with content -- is that going to be history? The architecture that's being proposed by the big cable operators would allow them to discriminate in terms of performance ... They could design highly discriminatory platforms, so that [your content] will play differently if you have a business relationship with the owner of the last mile. Whether or not the operators go the common courier route or the common cable route -- "We own the pipe and decide what goes on it" -- is a big deal.

AOL has been a big advocate of open access -- we need to have companies like AOL beating up on the regulators at state and federal level to change things. This merger is partly evidence that AOL thinks it's losing the battle to protect the competitors.

AOL was the biggest proponent of making it a level playing field. They say they still are, but it depends how much you trust Steve Case. We don't; historically he does what benefits him at the time.

Howard Rheingold, Net pioneer and author of "Virtual Community"

The more the Net becomes like TV, the stupider we are going to become; the more TV becomes like the Net, the more intelligent we'll become. It's the mass media-fication/dumbing down of the Net; the bigger these enterprises get and the broader their reach, the less intelligent their content. The Net used to be a grand alternative to television, and it still is. But with the expectations of the mass market, the big center of the curve, clearly AOL's ambition is to be more and more like television.

That doesn't mean that the intelligent stuff is going to go away, but a lot of attention and dollars will be drawn to lowest-common-denominator stuff that AOL is known for. I think the millions of voices are out there, but how many people are going to hear them?

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