[11852] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: In the matter of advertising
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Seth Ross)
Fri Apr 22 01:53:16 1994
From: seth@albion.com (Seth Ross)
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 94 16:12:11 -0700
To: "Martin L. Schoffstall" <schoff@us.psi.com>, com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: seth@albion.com
> Neither AOL nor Delphi institutionally are providing anything
> to the Internet community that is essentially "free". Some
> people think that this is capital W Wrong. Minimally it is
> anti-volunteerism.
Marty:
I think you've identified the source of the extensively reported "newbie
problem." Conventional wisdom blames the users. I look to the system
owner/operators. The Internet has survived anarchistic growth because of
a dynamic balance between resource consumers and resource producers. As
long as new producers, along with their hardware/wetware contributions,
have come online concurrently with new consumers, the balance has been
maintained.
AOL tipped the balance last month, by adding several hundred thousand new
users but no additional resources. AOL is tapping into the vast but finite
resources of the Internet without offering a single CPU cycle or FTP
document in return. In this way, the service is in a much more regressive
position than many of its smaller competitors, which manage everything
from electronic book intiatives to this list.
I look forward to observing how AOL and the other services that offer
access to Internet resources address this balance in the coming months.
Seth Ross
<seth@albion.com>
