As if to underscore that point, eight huge newspaper publishers had banded together earlier that spring to form New Century Network, a club for the big boys on the Net. Some people wondered if the giants might lose out in the end—readers wanted to tour the Web themselves, not just confine themselves to material favored by newspaper coalitions. And maybe New Century wouldn’t end up so exclusive after all. Also, advertisers might prefer to sprinkle their cash around the Web rather than focus it on newspaper chains—they could pay for links to their pages from many sites without much ado. The natural economies of the Net might yet win out over the business plans of the giants. Still, for the moment, publishers such as Gannett and the Washington Post Company were apparently setting the tone of New Century itself. The 185 New Century papers claimed more than 23 million paying readers.
“New Century might raise antitrust questions,” wrote Rory O’Connor, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, part of Knight-Ridder, a chain in New Century. Peter Winter, interim chief executive of New Century, said the publishers were “comfortable with our conformance to antitrust statutes.”[[4.31]]
Antitrust was the talk of the newspaper and online industries. In early June the U.S. Justice Department said it was studying the network that Microsoft aimed to launch in August. Just by clicking on the proper icon available through the Windows 95 operating system, people could join the Microsoft Network. And some newspapers and other online services feared that Microsoft could stifle the competition. In a year Windows might sell 20-40 million copies; what if several million users clicked?
Newspapers worried increasingly about the Microsoft Network and other online services. American Opinion Research of Princeton, N.J., found that almost a fifth of the surveyed editors and publishers thought they might lose more advertising to online services than to television. Nearly three-quarters said the business was in good shape now. Just a half felt the same would be true by the year 2005.[[4.32]]
The newspaper chains tried to fight back. Large papers now owned 11 percent of the shares in Netscape Communications, the wizards behind the fastest and best browser on the Web. For the moment things seemed fine for the public. Netscape came up with new wrinkles that other companies didn’t offer, such as the ability for Web pages to sprout color backgrounds without much fuss. But so far it was working with standards-setting bodies rather than saying, “Hey, you guys, these features will be mine alone.” I just hoped that in the future Netscape wouldn’t fashion its software to bind people to specific sources of news from conglomerates such as Knight-Ridder. Perhaps half the people cruising the Web were now using Netscape.
In a buying spree of its own, America Online purchased Internet fixtures such as WAIS Inc., the software company. WAIS had made some of the best publishing tools on the Net. America Online also bought the WebCrawler, a first-rate index to the Web. The company acquired Global Net Navigator, too, the wonderfully Netcentric magazine from O’Reilly and Associates, a guardian of Net culture. Just like Frank Daniels III, Tim O’Reilly alluded to the cost of online services. Explaining the sale, he told a GNN mailing list that “in order to really do justice to the information problem GNN was created to solve, GNN would have to be scaled up beyond our ability to fund it on our own. With many large players entering the Internet information services market, the best way to keep our lead was to team up with one of them.”
The most dramatic—and, some critics might say, ominous—alliance may have happened when MCI teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to form a new partnership that could offer many kinds of material on the Net. It committed as much as $2 billion toward his News Corporation.
MCI wasn’t just eager to be a pipeline for publishers and others—it wanted to Originate Content. The phone company was already publishing readers’ short stories electronically by way of Gramercy Press. Soon it would release a trade paperback—yes, a book on pulped wood—from a novelist writing under the name of a fictitious Gramercy author. But the Murdoch alliance meant so much more. This global entrepreneur controlled Harper-Collins through News Corps. Would his electronic books enjoy global distribution advantages via MCI’s pipelines, compared to offerings from smaller, less connected publishers?
Within the book business itself, the movement toward the Net was accelerating as summer 1995 neared. More and more authors were online, getting feedback from fans—just as the fledgling[fledgling] rockers of IUMA did. It was a great morale booster, but only to a point. The novelist Nicholson Baker, author of the New Yorker article on electronic library catalogues, complained that e-mail had “the problem of promptitude. You have to answer within four days or you’re being rude. I like the stateliness of paper, where you can take six months. You’re still being unforgivably rude, but somehow it’s okay because other people have been rude in this way before.”[[4.33]] Obscure writers, however, found the fan mail from the Internet to be more helpful. In that way the Net was a friend of diversity.
Smaller publishers were also growing more comfortable with the Internet. Bookport, a California-based service, let them post their books on the World Wide Web for Netfolks to read page by page. Alas, a customer could not obtain a whole e-book at once. The idea, of course, was to discourage piracy. I disliked the idea of pay-per-read prevailing; the library model would make books much more popular among the young and actually help good publishers. But the Bookport was well done with oodles of great links to book-related sites on the Web. One of the first titles was Netiquette, a guide to manners on the Internet; that was in the community-minded spirit of the traditional Net.