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The Day the Internet Died
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Jim Moore
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Dec 22, 2002 21:22 PST
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The Day the Internet Died
By Jim Moore, Online Editor
Do you any of you out there remember the days before cable
television? Those days of fuzzy broadcast signals and rabbit-ear
antennae? Back in those mid-60s, cable was an embryo industry and, in
exchange for public and government backing, those powers behind this
emerging technology painted for us a world of commercial-free
television.
By simply playing a small monthly fee, we could get a much
clearer signal, more options - and no commercials.
Well, as we can see, things have turned out much differently.
We do have more options, though. But cable rates have gone
through the ceiling and as for commercials - well, we're forced to look
at 5-6 times more than back in those pre-cable days.
The Internet, in its early days, held out the same promises ...
and seems to be winding up the same pitiful way - controlled by vastly
powerful corporate interests intent only on gouging the public for as
much money as possible and offering as little service as possible.
Welcome to the age of de-regulation.
The Internet has become swamped with a glut of in-your-face
advertising - from those damnable op-up windows to "interactive" ads
that suddenly cover up what you're reading and force you to wait until
they've done their pathetic little song and dance before you can pick up
where you left off.
Now we're told that AOL and Earthlink are poised to "lead the
way" by charging us to read their managed propaganda some call news.
CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC all charge you now to look at their tiny, fuzzy,
jerky "video" news online.
Across the board, the global conglomerates are starting to
change the face of the Internet by destroying the very things that made
it attractive in the first place.
Expedia (EXPE) said it began charging $5 for every airline
ticket purchased, effective Wednesday, Dec. 4 (CBS News). The decision
is in response to the declining revenue per ticket from the airlines,
said Andrea Riggs, a spokeswoman for Expedia, referring to the plunge in
commissions that travel agents had to endure over the past year. "We
wanted to maintain a high quality of service," she added.
So much for booking a ticket online to save a little on travel
agent fees.
The announcement comes one day after AOL Time Warner (AOL)
outlined to analysts and investors its plan to make its members pay up
for content.
"The free lunch is slowly getting phased out," observed Fred
Moran, an analyst at Jefferies & Co.
The Information Superhighway is fast becoming the Information
Super Toll, affordable only to the wealthy. Internet Service Providers
(ISPs) like AOL and Earthlink are trying to wean users off dial-up
service and onto the much more expensive broadband, even though it's not
even available in much of the country. If the industry has its way,
dial-up modems will soon be back in the closet shelves, gathering dust
along with CD players and Beta VCRs. Oh, and I think I saw an 8-track
audio cassette player back in the dust bunnies there somewhere, too.
Just as the economic gap widens, erasing the middle classes and
pushing them into either the rich or poor categories, so the evolution
of the Internet is doing more to widen the divide between information
haves and have-nots. In this case, the divide is as geographical as is
it is economic, shutting out Rural America.
Soon we'll be forced to choose between "free" ISPs such as Net
Zero or United Online - with our faces stuffed with ads so frequently
the screen below is rarely even visible - or we'll shell out
increasingly higher rates to the AOL-Earthlink giants for cable
Internet.
And when we all explode from advertising overload, we can look
back to the beginning of the 21st Century and say, in sad retrospect, "I
went to the levy, but the levy was dry. That was the day the Internet
died.
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Jim Moore is manager of Phoenix Technologies, a website design and
promotion service in Williamsport, TN, where he also serves as online
editor of TennTimes - the News (http://westviewnews.virtualave.net),
America's largest online newspaper. He has won numerous writing and web
design awards, is a member of the International Association of
Webmasters & Designers and for eight years produced, directed and hosted
"The Omega Report", a popular hour-long TV documentary cablecast into
1.5 million homes from Nashville to Boston.
He publishes a free monthly newsletter, "On the Go!", for busy people
like you.
Subscribe here
(http://www.topica.com/lists/OntheGo/subscribe/?location=listinfo)
or send an email to OntheGo-s-@topica.com.
He may also be reached at tennt-@mindspring.com.
Copyright 2002 by The Phoenix Foundation. All rights reserved.
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