[8751] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: One-way Internet?..no, it's "Asymetric"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (thosstew@aol.com)
Fri Dec 3 00:28:27 1993
Errors-To: <thosstew@aol.com>
Errors-To: <thosstew@aol.com>
From: thosstew@aol.com
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Reply-To: <thosstew@aol.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 93 23:48:01 EST
Mark Ludwig writes: "I think the people who make money on "entertaining" us
want us to
think the vast majority of people really do want primarily one-way
data flow. Even if consumers really do, I think that is exactly why
we should _not_ give it to them. I don't understand how we ended up
where we are today, but an awfully large number of people are bored
with life, and implicitly expect someone else to entertain them."
Actually, the single greatest surprise that mainstream corporations have
found when they have opened network services has been the eagerness with
which people want to communicate. E-mail nearly killedProdigy at the start,
for instance, and its love of chat rooms explains AOL's meteoric growth.
Indeed, the Internet itself was taken by surprise by how much people wanted
backtalk, and what is the biggest network of all, the phone network, but a
way for people to INTERact. Note that with something like $80 billion in
cash flow from local telephony alone, that market dwarfs the market for cable
TV.When Time-Warner experimented with 75 cable channels (a long way from what
is planned for Orlando) in Queens, NYC, the company was amazed that it made
consumers want to talk back more--just to the cable TV provider, mind you,
and just about which movies they wanted to see when. Why GTE doesn't provide
e-mail in its Cerritos pilot program is beyond me--but maybe these guys can't
see what's happening till it bites them in the butt.
Point is: one-way Internet won't happen. Nice thing about the anarchic
structure is that one-way service can be circumvented if someone tries to
make it happen. But even the dumbest of the providers will catch on to what
their customers want: There's just too much revenue to be earned. If most of
these promiscuous communicators are not uploading sophisticated databases or
Hollywood quality movies or writing letters of the literary merit of
Chesterton, if it's mostly just gossip and cybersex and mundane information
of the let's-meet-for-lunch-at-Lutece--so what? Eventually some people will
post beautiful or important work, or became entrepreneurs. Same as in any
medium.
Tom Stewart
