Transcriber’s Note:

Each chapter heading featured graphical components that are not readily rendered here. See the [note] for an example.

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NetWorld!

what people are

really

doing

on the

INTERNET,

and what

it means

to you

DAVID H. ROTHMAN

“A considerable achievement.”—William F. Buckley, Jr.

Current Events/Internet

“A considerable achievement. You find yourself wanting to read NetWorld! even if you have no thought of baptism into the great new scene.” —William F. Buckley, Jr.

“David H. Rothman has done the best job yet of illustrating exactly how and why the Internet will change the texture of daily life. Most discussion of the information age is full of airy generalizations. NetWorld! is full of specific, amusing, often racy illustrations of how people around the world have already put the Net’s possibilities to work. This is a very useful and entertaining book.” —James Fallows Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly

Exploring Life on the Net

Praised by the New York Times For his entertaining style, David H. Rothman has written a lively, revealing, and sharp-eyed account of life on the Net. Read how a handsome young librarian in Adelaide, Australia, got engaged to a Kansas City woman he’d never met——except online. Discover why net.censors and other interlopers could eventually cost America billions of dollars. Learn how an Anglican priest uses the Internet to “hear” confessions and help keep in touch with his flock. From electronic libraries to the digitized cadaver of an executed killer, NetWorld! covers everything that’s happening on the Net.

Whether you surf nightly or know the Net only secondhand, NetWorld! will shed new light on the cultural phenomenon that is engrossing millions around the world.

Prima Publishing

NetWorld!

What People

Are Really

Doing on the Internet,

and What It Means to

You

David H. Rothman

PRIMA PUBLISHING

With 88s to Carly,

my dearest company

in life and on the ’Bahn.

© 1996 by David H. Rothman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from Prima Publishing, except for the inclusion of quotations in a review.

PRIMA PUBLISHING and colophon are trademarks of Prima Communications, Inc.

Cover design by the Dunlavey Studio

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rothman, David H.

Networld!: what people are really doing on the Internet, and what it

means to you/David H. Rothman.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN O-7615-0013-8

1. Internet (Computer network) I. Title.

TK5105.875.I57R69 1995

004.6’7—dc20

95-5287

CIP

95 96 97 98 99 AA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

How to Order:

Single copies may be ordered from Prima Publishing, P.O. Box 1260BK, Rocklin, CA 95677; telephone (916) 632-4400. Quantity discounts are also available. On your letterhead, include information concerning the intended use of the books and the number of books you wish to purchase.

Contents

A Note to Visitors
(and Natives)

Everyone in NetWorld! is real, even me. Chapter 1 tells how to reach some good people who let their electronic addresses go on the Web site for this book.

In a few cases—most notably “Sue” and “Greg” in Chapter 7—I’ve guarded my subjects’ privacy with aliases and changes of identifying details. Asterisks show up after the first occurrences of their revised names.

Please note, too, that I’ve smoothed out people’s informal online prose to accommodate the printed page. A “smiley” on the Net is a good quick way to show a smile or frown; but I couldn’t think of anything uglier in print than a series of symbols such as :-). So even in quotes, I’ve used them sparingly.

I wish Mark Twain were alive and cruising the Internet at 28.8 kilobits per second; I’d love to see how he’d have handled net.dialect.

David Rothman,

rothman@clark.net

Alexandria, Virginia

Acknowledgments

Alison, step to the front! Alison Andrukow, a graduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, served as my chief researcher on this project—discovering a number of goodies ranging from Bianca’s Smut Shack to arcane, Net-related policy studies.

Jennifer Basye Sander, my editor at Prima Publishing, working with associate acquisitions editor Alice Anderson and the project editor, Steven Martin, provided many suggestions, as did the publisher, Ben Dominitz. The latter promoted this book, so to speak, from Digital America to Digital World, and in time the title NetWorld! also came from Ben. Surprise, you guys! You thought you were getting a general book on computer technology, but wisely you let me get caught up in the Net. Thanks!

Bill Adler and Lisa Swayne of Adler and Robin Books, joined by Nick Anis, agented this book. Nancy Daisywheel Breckenridge was the transcriptionist.

Finally, I want to thank the many people who gave their time by way of e-mail or otherwise. Lest I forget some important ones here, I won’t list any names. But by way of the references in the book itself, readers will learn the identities of many.

CHAPTER
ONE

The Terrain

A color photo lights up my computer screen when I hit the return key, and, in big, bold Times Roman letters, I see the latest from the Internet:

Playboy Is Traveling the Info Highway

Looking for Women for a Special

“Girls of the Net” Pictorial

Sitting atop a pile of books, a most ungeekish model looks flawlessly nubile, as if part of a virtual reality tableau conjured up for Hugh Hefner himself. Playboy’s message is clear: What counts isn’t mastery of Telnet, Gopher, Lynx, or other Net voodoo. Candidates should mail or e-mail “a recent full-length body photo in a two-piece bathing suit or less and a clear face shot.”

The same day a famous hacker named Cliff Stoll goes on a Washington radio station to promote his book Silicon Snake Oil, which says the Internet steals too much time from true learning and life.

For better or worse—mostly better in my opinion, egalitarian that I am—the Internet has Arrived.

A quarter-century ago scientists dreamed up a predecessor of the network to let computers jabber to each other across the United States, even after a nuclear attack. Fearless professors followed with electronic talk on topics ranging from biology to poetry.

Now it’s as if everyone is on the Internet—not just Playboy but Penthouse, some Arizona lawyers who love to inflict junk ads on the innocent, a Florida manicurist, Democratic and Republican stalwarts, thousands of college freshmen, punk teenagers, and elementary schoolers in London, Singapore, Minnesota, Nova Scotia—you name it. In one way or other, the Net ties in to smaller networks ranging from local, bulletin board-style systems to America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, Delphi, GEnie, Bitnet, Bix, eWorld, and MCI Mail.

Fans of David Letterman and Jay Leno, the world’s most famous talk-show rivals, are even duking it out online. The cyberspace section of Newsweek regularly lists the hottest attractions of the Internet—for example, the best sites on the World Wide Web, the multimedia area where you can see pictures and hear sound.

Hollywood is gambling on a movie called The Net, and Time and Newsweek have done several cover stories. Could the Time curse be at work here? Is everything else downhill, now that the Net has landed on The Cover? Not if you go by the stats. Internet demographers love to squabble about the exact number of people on the Internet, but at the very least, some 25-30 million can reach it by way of electronic mail; and in a few years, if the braver prophets are right, hundreds of millions may be wired in. For the snobs, of course, the old cachet is gone. A humor columnist says the Net is like citizens band radio with typing.

Is the Internet, then, about to become a 500,000-channel wasteland? Just what are all these millions really doing on the Net? Some politicians would have you think that a disturbing number of Netfolks are busy corrupting the morals of minors, and shouldn’t we ban smut from the public areas of cyberspace? And if you believe some American security bureaucrats, the Net might turn out to be a haven for spies and dope dealers. “Shouldn’t Washington,” they more or less ask, “be able to snoop on pervs and subversives who scramble their messages?”

The counterrevolution has begun, and I feel grouchy.

Everyone is trying to reinvent the Internet in his or her own image, even if, with these changes, the Net would no longer be the Net. What’s really pathetic is the ignorance of the would-be meddlers. Censoring the Net would be about as successful as trying to dam the Pacific. The same decentralization that made the Net more nuke-resistant, in the Cold War days, makes it harder to control. And how can Washington sell the Net on Fed-friendly chips for coded messages when scores of powerful encryption products are on sale in Russia and the rest of Europe?

At the same time, certain writers are now attacking the Internet as Cold and Heartless, or for other sins; some are even Pulling the Plug, at least temporarily, to protect their delicate brains against Information Overload.

“Don’t make me go back!” J. C. Hertz recalls telling her editors when they wanted her to log back on the Net to wind down a book called Surfing the Internet. “Please, don’t make me go back there.” Stephen L. Talbott, a computer editor and author of The Future Does Not Compute, proclaims that he “immediately felt very good” when he Unplugged. Bill Henderson of the Push Cart Press says he’ll publish a book with “cries from the heart about what electronics has done to people.”[^[1.1]]

Perhaps a new literary genre is aborning—that of the Snubbites, the new Luddites[^[1.2]] who feel all Netted Up. The definition might go something like this:

Snubbite:—n. One who, partly out of snobbery, partly out of boredom, partly out of sheer contrariness, snubs the computer technology that could help millions of others.

A typical Snubbite is upper-middle class and very possibly Ivy League. Snubbites could afford computer and Internet connections—or more likely enjoyed them at others’ expense—years before average people were even allowed on the Net. Often Snubbites live near large libraries or can catch up with books easily enough in other ways. Snubbites may have already used the Net to help stock up on their quota of friends and professional contacts. Most Snubbites are harmless and even charmingly eccentric; they worry me only when they start confusing their own needs and non-needs with those of society at large.

Cliff Stoll himself is very much on the Internet (“I still love my networked community”) even now; to this day, I suspect, he truly enjoys seeing people home-brew their own machines. But in stretches of his book he could almost be mistaken for a Snubbite anyway, based on sheer fervor. “It is an overpromoted, hollow world, devoid of warmth and human kindness,” Stoll writes of cyberspace, and goes on to say that nets address “few social needs or business concerns” and threaten “precious parts of our society, including schools, libraries, and social institutions.” He complains, “No birds sing.”

Have I been hallucinating? The Internet isn’t Woodstock, the Vatican, or an aviary, but it is bringing together people for religion, education, business, love, and suicide prevention. Just what is Stoll writing about? Does the Net have an evil twin? Jews, Moslems, Lutherans, and Catholics—they are all using the Net to exchange prayers or electronic newsletters. Up in Canada an Anglican priest will even take confessions via e-mail. I doubt he’d agree with the author of Snake Oil.

Nor, I suspect, would the members of Walkers in Darkness. Walkers is a mailing list for people with chronic depression, and each week more than 300 messages whiz across the Net from Australia to Israel, from South Africa to California. I’m not depressed, but someone close to me is, and she spends hour after hour with her laptop, gazing at the blue-and-white on the screen, reading scores of messages, keeping up with the gossip about people and drugs, wondering what she would do without her Net connection. Being depressed is like kayaking or hang gliding: You won’t die immediately if you skip the homework, but in a pinch you’ll stand a much better chance if you’ve gone far beyond the basics. Walkers is in the grand tradition of the Net. Its members don’t blindingly trust authority figures—their own shrinks—and they are reaching out to other patients and to an online psychiatrist. Tell us, Ivan, some Walkers ask, is Parnate as good a drug as it’s cracked up to be? What about Nardil? Can you take it without your body swelling up?

“Ivan” is a well-credentialed psychopharmacologist in New York City who helps out for free. Dr. Ivan Goldberg doesn’t prescribe drugs for people online, but he will report his own experiences with them after many years of practice. He has a knack for coming up with angles that patients’ own doctors might miss. After months on Prozac, a man found his work slipping. Ivan Goldberg told him of a new way—successful here, it turns out—to treat the problem.

Goldberg is online two hours a day “as a way of paying back for the thirty-plus good years I have had from my work with depressed people.”[^[1.3]] After several years on the Net helping virtual support groups, he has won the respect of hundreds and perhaps even thousands.

Still, Walkers compare notes with each other and don’t accept even Ivan Goldberg’s opinions automatically. Just as if they were talking over the office watercooler, they weigh the validity of the information themselves. But what a collection of facts! When a new antidepressant shows up in Canada or the United Kingdom, Walkers learn about it many weeks before the news reaches the daily papers in the States, assuming that word makes their daily newspapers at all.

Many of the best conversations, however, aren’t about drugs or the merits or perils of electroconvulsive shock treatments. They’re about other Walkers. Remember the gay Walker in Iowa who was so quick to welcome newcomers and answer questions? Well, here’s his obit: Died of complications from diabetes. How about the fellow on the East Coast, the programmer who never logs on with a name? Is he okay, after his last suicide attempt? Is somebody going to drop by to visit him in the hospital? What about such-and-such’s cat? How’s your new girlfriend? Is your landlord being reasonable? The questions and answers fly across the wires. Walkers may not be as famous a virtual community as The WELL, Echo, and similar bulletin board systems with Net and media connections, but it’s hardly as if the luminaries of those places enjoy a monopoly on Caring.

Later that morning I hear Cliff Stoll push his book on WAMU radio. It’s a slaughter; the call-ins run against him by at least five to one. I even feel a little sorry for him until I remember that the technophobes at many bookstores may outnumber the technophiles. The full title of the book is Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, and it should be just the ticket for Luddites and Snubbites with spare change. I myself have Second Thoughts about his Second Thoughts. Early on in his book he says: “I look forward to the time when our Internet reaches into every town and trailer park.” But his true emphasis comes through. Just how much of a technopopulist is he in the end when he claims that networks will “isolate us from one another” and “work against literacy and creativity?”

What’s really freaky is that a woman from Walkers or a similar discussion group—out of all the thousands on the Net—calls up The Diane Rehm[Rehm] Show and ever so politely shreds the arguments that Stoll has made in Oil. A few years ago he wrote The Cuckoo’s Egg, a wonderful book about his battles against errant hackers, and parts of Snake Oil do ring true, but oh how wrong he is about the more cosmic issues. Confronted with the Walkers-style example, Stoll acknowledges that, yes, maybe the Net could be of use to people who need support. After all, the very anonymity he’s assailed can work in favor of honest dialogue. Exactly. One of the glories of Walkers, however, is that depressed people can be as open or nameless as they want. What’s more, they can even go Face to Face. Several Walkers near me, for example, will spend hours and hours talking in person with others dogged by this scourge of Lincoln and Churchill.

Dave Harmon is the man behind the Walkers list. He’s a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard grad, bearded, bespectacled, and a little on the heavy side, as he describes it. I learn that he works as a programmer for a company that writes software to use with mice—the computer kind. His depression is moderate. Come the middle of the night, he may wake up in a cold sweat; he can also suffer flagging energy.

Several years ago Harmon was crouched in a Boston bus shelter, enjoying a break from a crowded but rainy New Year’s Eve celebration, when he took out a notebook and wrote a poem. “I am the Walker in Darkness,” it read in part, “I am the bringer of light.” The next day Harmon called the company that had hooked him into the Internet—he wanted to start a list for depressed people interested in art and magic. “The thing that makes the Net so powerful is that you don’t have to get into a big deal to start a minor newsgroup or a mailing list.” The newsgroups and the mailing lists can precisely reflect Netfolks’ interests, loves, and fears—much more closely than, say, CBS or the New York Times, or even niche programs on cable.

Oklahoma City and the

Ban-the-Bomb-Manual Panic

A citation for The Terrorist’s Handbook popped up on my screen a minute after I started a search of the World Wide Web under the word “explosives.” I apparently would be able to make “book bombs,” “lightbulb bombs,” “phone bombs.”

Trying to retrieve the Handbook some weeks later, I read the following: “Are you sure this resource exists?” Cute. The heat is on. Handbook-style items caught the attention of the U.S. Senate after sickos blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 160 people. The response in effect was: “Ban the bomb manuals—from the Net and otherwise!” and as of this writing, it looked as if such sentiments might end up as law. Still, a little problem arose in the case of The Terrorist’s Handbook on the Net. The material was coming to me from Lysator, a respected academic computer society at Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden. Last I knew, the U.S. Senate did not enjoy jurisdiction over its counterparts in Stockholm.

The Swedish computer that stored The Terrorist’s Handbook, however, contains megabyte after megabyte of valuable material on computing and other subjects, and the electronic librarians didn’t want to anger the university. So out of prudence, they voluntarily removed the bomb manual after hysterical stories appeared in the press. The Handbook wasn’t worth the fuss.

Perhaps in other cases Washington will use diplomacy with other countries to unplug Handbook-style items. But no one should count on this approach working in the end. Inevitably the same material will be secretly making the rounds of obscure electronic bulletin board systems, as opposed to the Net itself. As if that isn’t enough, Washington has unwittingly given out instructions for bomb-makers by way of the tax-financed Blaster’s Handbook from the Forestry Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Even The Encyclopedia Britannica has printed material on explosive making.

Most disturbing of all, Constitutional issues arise here. We don’t need the government to restrain free speech. As writer Brock N. Meeks wrote in his CyberWire Dispatch newsletter, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal was “a break in the dike.” It was “the trickle that could become a river of regulatory hammers meant to turn the rough-and-tumble, open and free-flowing online discourse into something with all the appeal and intellectual acumen of tofu.”

Newsgroups are a bit like local bulletin board systems except that some newsgroups reach hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Mailing lists are more intimate than newsgroups since you usually need to sign up for them electronically before you receive the messages.

“The funny thing,” Harmon says of freshly created mailing lists, “is that you never know what will result. What I found was that most depressed people couldn’t produce that much art and mysticism, but they were interested in supporting each other, and I looked at that and let it go on its own.”

A seventy-eight-year-old widow in the American South discovered Harmon’s list. She was the first in her family, after several generations of mental illness, to seek psychiatric help. People from Singapore have popped up, too, reporting how they were stigmatized as lazy by people unable to understand the energy-sapping qualities of the disease. Walkers tell of spouses complaining about the loss of sex drive from depression or medications. Simply put, Harmon’s list has not just helped people cope with a disease, but it has also helped those who can’t understand it. And as shown by the Singaporean example, geography has been inconsequential for the most part. “When you’re depressed,” Harmon says, “it doesn’t matter where you’re from, you’re still depressed.”

What’s more, Walkers can log on as often or seldom as they want. Frequently the depressed feel all “peopled up,” so they may flee into their rooms and close the blinds when visitors approach. But with Walkers messages, all they need do is press the delete key. The Internet isn’t just a medium of special benefit to the deaf; it’s also one for the seriously depressed, many of whom, if made Netless, might try to do without any company offline.

As with thousands of other Net lists, people come and go, some of them overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages; Stoll is right to characterize the Internet as like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. But a core of stalwarts remain enthusiastically on Walkers, and along with Harmon and Goldberg, they’re rather small-townish in cyberspace in the best of ways. I ask about the East Coast Walker with suicidal tendencies. Harmon says that by the time the supportive messages reached the man, the programmer had already called 911 and gone to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.

But, yes, Harmon says, Walkers has indeed saved lives. “A more usual situation is that someone is considering suicide and issues an appeal to Walkers for help. They’ll say something to the effect that ‘It’s not worth it, and nothing I do ever works, and I’m probably bothering you with this note.’ People respond to it and sometime call the person by phone if the number is available.” If the number isn’t, Harmon and other Netheads will try to use their knowledge of the Internet to track it down. “We don’t breach privacy unless there really is a suicide threat, and sometimes people’s accounts may be on services where we can’t find them. More usually, various people may send their own phone numbers either privately or to someone or to the list, so that other members can reach them.

“The Internet,” he cautions, “is not always a fast-rescuer—you may be lucky to get same-day service. In the programmer’s case his note didn’t even get to my list for an hour, much less get sent out to all the members. I found out about his note by getting a midnight phone call!”

Still, Harmon sees the Net as a godsend for ongoing support and as a crisis aid even if the help isn’t always immediate. Goldberg agrees: “It’s mobilized people to all kinds of interventions.”[^[1.4]]

“I’m sitting here with a knife in my hand,” wrote a community college student asking for support from Walkers. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill myself—just hurt myself a little. I just feel as though I deserve pain.” She went on to tell how she had been in the National Honor Society in high school, gone on to an honors program at Loyola University for several years, then had been forced to leave. “I used to be strong, brilliant, and ambitious and now I am stupid and manic depressive. It just hurts so much. So I guess that’s why I’m cutting on my wrists tonight.” She told me when I wrote to ask about her condition—improved—that “I would be lost without Walkers.”

A near-suicide in Santa Clara, California, aided by the newsgroup alt.support.depression, recalls: “I was so close it was amazing.” Medical debts had overwhelmed him. He was a single father and his boss had put him on probation after child care gobbled up too much work time. In tears he began his note: “It doesn’t really matter any more.” A New York woman saw the note and begged people online to help. Hundreds of messages came over the Net from as far as Japan. Tracked down despite his unsigned post, the California man received help not only from a colleague at work but also from police. “Something snapped,” he recalls, “and I just realized that there were a lot of people there who cared.”[^[1.5]]

Madness, another self-help group on the Net, is a mailing list for people who suffer drastic mood swings, hear voices, and see visions. Now, says Sylvia Caras, who runs the list, they can use the Net to carry on a dialogue with federal mental health officials. The Net offers a very real voice for those the world might otherwise ignore.

I could go on forever about support groups on the Net. Whether you’re short or extra tall, anorexic or 300 pounds, a victim of cancer or of child abuse, the Internet teems with people wanting to share their experiences with you—a task made much easier through the efficiencies of the Net, which have brought the cost of electronic mail down so much. I bristle when I hear people talk about the Internet as worthless unless big profits await megaconglomerates. The activities of support groups and other virtual communities may not show up in any country’s gross domestic product, but in the aggregate they’re just as valuable as anything to emerge from AT&T or Time Warner.

May I emphasize that the Net is far, far more than a mental health clinic? It’s a place, too, for political activists, boaters, golfers, motorcyclists, gun owners, gourmets, football fans, baseball enthusiasts, parents and teachers, writers and readers of many genres, pilots, airline passengers, amateur radio operators, and reggae lovers. All have their own niches, which is just what you’d expect with more than 12,000 newsgroups.

While the clueless are arguing over whether the Net has value, people like John Schwartz already know it does. Recently he wondered about lyrics by a singer and songwriter named Liz Phair. Just how did they go? Some of the biggest fun came from his hunt online. He tracked down at least five different Web areas—“digital fan magazines”—devoted to Phair. “Some had photos, some had biographical information, and a couple had song lyrics.” And yes, he found the lyrics he wanted, and in their full, unprintable glory. “Useless? Probably. Satisfying? You bet.” And Schwartz went on: “Think of all the stuff that you’d find in your public library if you pulled something off the shelf. A lot of it would be ‘useless’ for your own needs—tons of mediocre fiction, outdated information, and silly things. But would anybody say that it proves that libraries are worthless?”[^[1.6]]

Other Net activities also suggest that Snake Oil is self-descriptive. A Michigan couple has started a virtual toy store complete with pictures of their staffers as children and service of the kind you’d expect from L. L. Bean; their first order came from Brazil (see chapter 2: Business[Business] on the Net: From White Rabbit Toys to “Intel Inside”). Out in California two young techies are giving hundreds of young musicians a break through a much-needed project called the Internet Underground Music Archives (chapter 3: EntertaiNet: A Few Musings on Net.Rock, Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Gates, Bianca’s Smut Shack, and David Letterman in Cyberspace). Just throw $100 their way and, for a year, you can post a sample of your music on the Net and perhaps stir up sales of old cassettes and CDs.

At the same time that Stoll grouses that the Internet is unedited, scores of dailies and weeklies are on the Net to one extent or another (chapter 4: Pulped Wood versus Electrons: Can the Print World Learn to Love the Net?). So’s Time magazine. Random House, Macmillan, and Time Warner are there, too, posting samples from various books, and soon people at home will be able to send credit card numbers securely over the Net and dial up the complete texts of bestsellers and other books. Even now you just might be reading NetWorld! off a screen rather than from pulped wood.

Meanwhile, a digitized cadaver on the Internet may help revolutionize the study of anatomy ([chapter 5]: Wired Knowledge: When They Let a Murderer Loose on the Internet), and in Canada, leather-jacketed teenagers are using the Net to develop their reading and writing skills.

A Mini Jargon Guide

• Electronic Mail or e-mail. You can use the Net and other networks to send messages to your friends in Peoria or Melbourne—anywhere, in fact, where Internet connections go, from Alaska to the South Pole. An electronic mailbox is just like the physical equivalent. It’s a little storage area where your messages pile up for you to retrieve when you want.

• File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. It’s a means to send or receive files from one computer to another.

• Gopher. This program lets you track down information on the Net. The word Gopher also alludes to certain Gopher-style collections of computer files. Different Gophers connect to each other through items on menus. You might start looking at an article on water pollution from a computer in Washington, D.C., see a mention of an African river, click on that menu choice with your mouse or otherwise select it, and end up at a computer in Johannesburg.

• Internet Relay Chat. It’s like a huge party line except that people are typing rather than talking. You can open up private areas, too, and reach just one person.

• Mailing Lists. To be a bit simplistic, they’re just like regular electronic mail, except that a number of people share messages, to which you can typically respond privately or with the entire list. Some lists, however, let only the moderator send out messages. Via Usenet, some mailing lists appear as newsgroups.

• Newsgroups. These are the bulletin board systems of the Net, in effect. Almost anyone can post messages there and potentially reach hundreds of thousands of people—far more than on most mailing lists, since people can read newsgroups without subscribing. The newsgroups are part of a service called Usenet, which reaches BBSs around the world, not just the Internet. No one owns this anarchy, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

• Telnet. Without leaving my regular keyboard I can operate a computer at Oxford University or the University of California by way of a procedure called Telnet. I’m remotely controlling the machines at the other end.

• The World Wide Web. It’s the area of the Net that not only lets you read text but also see pictures, hear sounds, and even take in short clips from movies. Like Gophers, sites on the World Wide Web connect with each other. A program that lets you navigate the Web is known as a browser. Among the more popular browsers are Mosaic, Netscape, and Lynx (the latter, alas, won’t let you instantly enjoy pictures).

Also, the Net, in the opinion of many, is mocking Orwell’s predictions (chapter 6: Governments and the Net: Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong). Some serious threats remain—such as the efforts of American bureaucrats to make the Net more friendly to snoopy cops—but 1995 is a long way from 1984. What’s more, the Internet doesn’t offer just sex.

Love, too, can thrive. The persistent may indeed find wives and husbands on the Net (chapter 7: The Electronic Matchmaker).

This all happens on my Internet—anyway the one I’ll describe here. Let me offer an inevitable caveat, however: The Net is too vast for one writer to cover everything. So I won’t bother with Internet Relay Chat, where you instantly see the other people’s typing. As a temporary habitué of these regions, J. C. Hertz started to regard the Internet as “a Sartrean hell—too many people talking at one time.”[^[1.7]] Yes! Net chat brings Hemingwayesque accounts from witnesses to Japanese earthquakes or Russian coups, and I’m happy it’s around for the aficionados, especially net.lovers, who can retreat to their own private channels; but I myself favor electronic mail and newsgroups, which I can read on my own terms without parrying incessantly with dyspeptic strangers half a planet removed. I promise, dear readers: I’ll inflict nary a chat transcript on you.

Certain omissions, however, really pain me. Given more time, I’d have loved to cover the growth of the community network movement. For free, in many cities, you can open up an Internet account and tap into electronic libraries all over the world or receive electronic mail. Best of all, “communets” can bring communities together. The Net is one of the big lures to get people online, but once there, they may be able to fetch the schedule of their local public radio stations, find out about local charities, and talk back electronically to officials of city halls.

What’s fascinating is the resemblance between these local nets and the Net at large. People on both would rather chat with other citizens than swap e-mail with the politicians or other celebrities. And why not? Communets are communities, just as the Net, serving so many interests, is a series of communities. Alas, Stoll does not appreciate the possibilities here.

Stoll is an astronomer, not just a hacker, and his makes me feel as if he is using a scratchy pair of binoculars to look for life on Mars. Fixated on negatives, he has downplayed even the obvious: the Net equivalent of Martian mountains. Has Stoll dropped by alt.music.chapel-hill, or rec.arts.dance, or alt.christnet.christianlife, or the Dallas Virtual Jewish Community Center Home Page, or the American Ireland Fund, or the Voter Education Project? And how about the thousands of other Web pages in which individual Netfolks can share with the world their love of families and pets, or gardening, or , or old Chevies, or whatever else they enjoy, at or away from their computers? Item by item, those are tiny, almost invisible slices of Netlife; but en masse, they rise up as mountains.

Yes, yes, sex areas thrive on the Internet. But it is that way offline, too; do snack-food stores turn millions each year off Chaucer or Playboy? Of course Chaucer himself could be randy at times, as could Shakespeare and Joyce and hundreds of other literary greats—an inconvenient fact for the American ayatollahs who hope to censor the Net.

The biggest irony here is that the Internet can actually promote Family Values and strengthen real neighborhoods. As George Gilder and others have noted, the new technology can serve people’s exact needs rather than just dish out the standard sex and violence so beloved to TV networks. The Net is Example One in my opinion—especially The Barcroft School and Civic League page on the World Wide Web. Several thousand people live in the Barcroft area of Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. It’s neither a slum nor a glitzy, status-crazed neighborhood, just a good place to raise the families that the ayatollahs love to extol. An old Methodist church has served as a community house. Now an electronic equivalent is on the Web, complete with a color photo of the church building; people can catch up with neighborhood news and learn of ice cream socials.

I’m writing this paragraph just before the Barcroft Fourth of July parade. The word from the World Wide Web is that Susan O’Hara Christopher will be the Grand Marshall. People can enjoy Nancy Tankersley’s watercolors of past parades, or “Jim Lande’s famous tree trunk sculpture. Games for the kids, no political campaigning, hot dogs and lemonade, the new Barcroft tee shirts and lots more!” The higher the percentage of Netfolks among the citizenry, the more Fourth of July bulletins we’ll see in cyberspace.

Across the Potomac in D.C., the Internet is helping to reduce the number of hookers and drug pushers plying the Blagden Alley neighborhood. If the police catch you looking for women or dope, a man named Paul Warren will put your name on the World Wide Web. Thanks to his “Crimenet,” residents no longer stand as much a chance of finding a hooker at work on the sidewalk a few yards from toddlers in living rooms. Not everyone would approve of the privacy implications here, but I myself love what Warren is doing. Like thousands of small-town newspapers that print the names of the arrested, Warren is just spreading around the public record. A notice reminds readers that “Criminal defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty”; and he is willing to post an update for anyone exonerated. Warren isn’t saying that prostitution should be illegal everywhere, just that it should not force young families out of Blagden Alley.

That, in fact, is how I feel about net.sex. If a fifth grader encountered alt.sex.bestiality whenever he or she flicked on a computer, why, yes, I’d join the ayatollahs. But the Net is not like the pre-Web Blagden Alley or daytime television. You normally don’t find sex on the Net—at least not the truly kinky type—unless you seek it out. And the computer industry is working on software to reduce the chances of children accidentally running across alt.sex.bestiality. Even now, of course, the language in the average area of the Net is much cleaner than the words in the locker room of the typical high school. Trying to ban “smut” from the Internet would be like shutting down high school football because some sixteen-year-old tackles love to cuss at teammates and gawk at nude pictures.

Granted, the Net has problems, and rather serious ones. A Californian stole 20,000 credit card numbers from Net users; in New York some young men met through the Net and figured out ways to order tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise illegally. Many Netfolks think it’s too risky to send credit card numbers over the Net itself when ordering merchandise; better to use the telephone or fax. What’s more, just as Stoll says, business on the Net is overhyped. Meanwhile the Feds have reduced subsidies to the Net. Over in Australia there are already bothersome charges for use according to the amount of material transmitted, and people fear that the same could happen in the States.

Just as frustratingly, the technology isn’t quite there yet. Pictures can take centuries to appear on my screen when I fetch material on the World Wide Web. I hook into the Internet by dialing up ClarkNet, a company in a barn south of Baltimore. This is one of the best services, but a good part of the time, in recent months, I’ve suffered a busy signal or worse when I try to dial in. Given the overcrowding of the Net, electronic mail takes longer to arrive than it once did. I believe Stoll when he says that in some cases the United States Postal Service will get mail from one place to the other faster than the Net will handle e-mail. That’s the exception, but I’m disturbed to see it happen even part of the time.

I lament, too, the lack of commercial books available on the Net for free, in the public library tradition. Cliff Stoll is absolutely right to want better content, and my friend Jim Besser would agree with us. Jim is a journalist avid for new facts; he regrets that so much of the information on the Net is wrong or out of date. Beyond that, his Internet connection sometimes goes south when he is under a deadline.

Cures for the Internet’s problems, however, are or could be on the way. Technology will make the Net safer to use and more reliable—lo and behold, the computers in the barn have behaved somewhat better these past few weeks. Over the long run, too, Netlife will improve. Popular programs in some cases, even now, are letting customers send credit card numbers online without the hackers intercepting them. Net businesses will take off when more people sign on and young hackers get jobs and families.

The Internet will even survive the reduction of subsidies from Washington. The price of the technology will just keep going down if past trends apply, and if the government doesn’t let phone companies gouge people. Everything is faster and cheaper. Once the experts doubted that ordinary phone lines could carry signals at 9.6 kilobits, or 9,600 bits, per second. Today, even if I’m not IBM or the phone company, I can cruise along at around 28.8 kilobits per second, which is enough to receive a book in a few minutes.

If Cliff Stoll really wants electronic books, then computer networks can transmit them. When, just when, will Washington be brave enough to work toward a well-stocked national digital library offering commercial books for all; why should we replicate online the “savage inequalities” of our libraries and schools?

Netfolks aren’t the reason why such a library for the Internet is so far off right now, and why we may well end up with a national digital bookstore as opposed to a true library offering books at no charge or at minimal cost. Even technophobic librarians—they exist, even if not in the same numbers as before—aren’t the true villains here. Lobbyists are at fault. Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar, Bruce Lehman, is himself a former lawyer-lobbyist who acts as if he is still fighting for his old copyright clients. Members of his former law firm have donated tens of thousands of dollars to influential politicians. And in a five-year period people with corporate or family ties to a legal publisher, West Publishing in Minnesota, have given more than $738,000 in political contributions, some of which went to members of Congress influential on copyright matters.

With less eagerness to please lobbyists pushing for corporate business plans—rather than for the commonweal—the U.S. government could divert resources from bureaucracy to knowledge and pay publishers and writers fairly. How? Suppose Washington would link the national library with a focused program to buy hardware that schools and local libraries could lend out. In effect the Feds would prime the private market by encouraging mass production and by sending a message about priorities. Small, tablet-shaped computers with extra-sharp screens could eventually go on sale—much sooner than otherwise—for $99.95 at Kmart. And these same machines, although designed for reading electronic books, would be excellent for the Net or for filling out easy electronic forms; we could save tens of billions in money and time in the private and public sectors of America’s $6-trillion economy. Needless to say, too, this affordable hardware could mean more eyes for retail businesses on the Internet.

Then high tech wouldn’t pose such a problem to nontechie consumers and to computerphobic women and minorities. A study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology showed that 94 percent of the surveyed users on the Web were male and 87 percent were white. With less-threatening hardware and proper training of the right people, however, schools and neighborhood libraries could help bring a much wider segment of society on the Net. Cliff Stoll is aware of the possibilities here. He knew two years ago of my TeleRead proposal to improve the content of the Net, get many more people online, and spread the electronic books around from the very start. How much easier it must be for him to eulogize old wooden card catalogues and avoid a nasty tangle with lobbyist-cowed politicians and bureaucrats.

Touring NetWorld! Yourself—Via the Web

Webfolk, check out the Internet Underground Music Archive, White Rabbit Toys, electronic magazines, and many of the other Net delights I’ve described in this book. Just use your Netscape, Mosaic, or other browser to go to

http://www.webcom.com/~prima/networld.html

You’ll find there a list of various Web sites mentioned here in the pulped wood NetWorld!—and perhaps some informal updates. You can reach the sites immediately. Just click on the hypertext links. People at the other end may change the links, but I’ve made them as up-to-date as I could.

If you would like Net addresses of some of the people mentioned in this book, go to

http://www.clark.net/rothman/pub/networld.html

Perhaps you’ll also want to see a detailed electronic version of my TeleRead proposal for a well-stocked, cost-justified national digital library. It could let ordinary readers dial up the entire texts of copyrighted books from home for free without cheating publishers and writers. For more on TeleRead, check out the hyperlinked Net incarnation of my chapter in a forthcoming book Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1995):

http://www.clark.net/rothman/pub/telhome.html

Bashing technology, of course, is hardly new. In 1854 a writer complained: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” He said that “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through to the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”[^[1.8]] Henry David Thoreau was the writer and the words appeared in Walden.

Does their source, however, make them less dubious? Hardly. Imagine America without the telegraph—without an opportunity to forge lucrative commercial ties with the Old World, or to strengthen Texas’s ties to Washington. As it turned out, Texas and the rest of the country had plenty to say. So did railroad employees talking to each other; companies could more easily use single tracks to handle traffic in both directions, knowing that the telegraph was there to handle scheduling.[^[1.9]] In other fields, such as medicine, the telegraph undoubtedly hastened progress as well. It also helped friends and families keep in touch as the country was settled; today the Net does the same with people in this era of international travel. Technology, then, while ripe with opportunities for abuse, can do far more than recruit “Girls of the Net” or spread word of a princess’s whooping cough.

Ironically, if the Cliff Stolls prevail, and if too many white hats abandon the nets as “devoid of warmth and human kindness,” then his predictions will come to pass; the greedy will take over, confident that others won’t mind so much.

Together with millions of other Netfolks, I’ll remember the Great Spamming of ’94. Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel, husband-and-wife partners in an Arizona law firm called Canter and Siegel, wanted to sell their services as immigration experts. So they splattered a “Green Card” ad—as if hurling spam against a wall—across some 6,000 newsgroups on Usenet. They didn’t care if you preferred to read about baseball or UNIX; they wanted your eyeballs. The Net seethed. I myself disliked many of the tactics used against Canter and Siegel—was it really necessary to threaten death or favor them with a slew of unsought magazine subscriptions?—but clearly they merited some good, strong, healthy loathing. I complained to the American Bar Association, which, at the time, was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a PR campaign to upgrade the image of lawyers. You might say that C & S set the goodwill account back by several million.

My big regret is that I lacked more time to raise hell against Canter and his wife online and in other ways. The glory of the Net, this series of communities, was and is diversity; here C & S were dumbing it down to the broadcast model where one program served all. But Canter and Siegel didn’t give a whit about the Net as it existed, about the outrage that so many unwilling people were bearing the costs of sending and storing their unwanted messages, about the fact that Usenet couldn’t survive continued assaults in this vein, about the damage they were doing to the various forms of Net culture, a phrase that C & S would undoubtedly have dismissed as an oxymoron.

Canter and Siegel later added to the insult with How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway, the 1990s equivalent of a guide to exterminating buffalo.[^[1.10]] The book talked of selling to 30 million people, which was malarkey. Some Net demographers challenged the figure at the time—reality may finally have caught up—but more important, most of those 30 million could only send and receive electronic mail as opposed to using services such as the World Wide Web. And just how many people wanted to receive junk mail from marketers? Of course C & S might suggest mailing lists for the receptive—nothing wrong there—but without access to the right Net services, fewer people would know of the lists in the first place.

Does this mean that the Internet should be free of commerce? Quite the opposite. The challenge is simply to avoid letting the hardsellers overwhelm the Internet. Countless areas of the Net exist where people not only tolerate ads, they want to read them. Besides, the commercial and noncommercial can build on each other. When I put my TeleRead proposal on the World Wide Web—that is, my call for a well-stocked national digital library with copyrighted books included—I built in hypertext links[^[1.11]] to Web sites that could be useful. And several just happened to be commercial. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, had done a Pulitzer-quality expose of the thousands of dollars that West Publishing had doled out in trips for some Supreme Court justices who passed judgment on copyright matters. Just why should I have avoided this superb material when a commercial publication was good enough to share it with the Net for free?

Electronic cafes, found in San Francisco, Seattle, London, and Hong Kong, among other locations, are another good example of how the commercial and noncommercial can strengthen each other. Cafes with Internet hookups can even help bridge the gap between Net and life. The Internet Cafe at 1363 4th Avenue in Prince George, British Columbia, doesn’t just offer a coffee bar. Customers of the local Internet provider can pick up their e-mail there and wander around the Net, read “a good, old-fashioned cork bulletin board for community information exchanges,” learn about local service agencies, watch resident artists at work, buy crafts from all over the world, and even get advice from a local psychologist, Russ Winterbotham, who just happens to own the place.

When Stoll writes about an Ontario bookstore with a water garden and three cats, it’s easy to appreciate the potential charms of commerce offline. But clearly the Net itself can spice up a traditional business. In London, you can drop by the Cyberia cafe at 39 Whitfield Street and plunk down £1.50 for a large cappuccino and £2.50 for a half-hour on the Net. The word is that the cafe has drawn “more media coverage than a small war.” I’m not surprised. Even if prices might be a bit lower by my standards, Cyberia is meeting a definite need. Of course Stoll would complain that the customers in the electronic cafes are “surrounded by people, yet escaping into conversations with distant strangers.” Isn’t he forgetting something, however: The way many Net aficionados love to meet the like-minded in person?

I’m also keen, needless to say, on the pioneering work that thousands of small businesses are doing on the World Wide Web itself—rather than posting in-your-face ads to nonrelevant newsgroups.

No, Web businesses aren’t charities or consumer service organizations. But by offering details about their products and services, they are respecting our intelligence far more than does the huckstery on television. You wouldn’t want to buy a new Buick or Volvo if you simply went by statistics and photos on the Web. But you just might learn more about gas mileage and safety claims than if you relied simply on the sales rep and brochures in the showroom. The more you shop this way, the more you’ll encourage manufacturers to improve their products and services rather than just to shell out megabucks on more Super Bowl ads. Net business, major limitations notwithstanding, is indeed A Good Thing.

Our first stop in NetWorld!, in fact, might well be one of my favorite stores in cyberspace—White Rabbit Toys.

CHAPTER
TWO

Business on the Net:

From White Rabbit

Toys to “Intel Inside”

Bob Lilienfeld worked for Procter & Gamble and the outfit behind the Muppets, and JoAnn Lilienfeld was a buyer at Bloomingdale’s. Nowadays he consults on solid waste and other environmental issues. His wife, a neatly coifed woman who looks and dresses like an upscale schoolteacher,[^[2.1]] has started a toy store called White Rabbit Toys in honor of the character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Bob enjoys technology. JoAnn herself is no slouch in that area. They are in their forties now but relish new marketing wrinkles just as much as when they were earning their MBAs from Northwestern University.

So Bob and JoAnn Lilienfeld have set up shop on the Internet, where, in a surprising but logical way that a mathematician like Lewis Carroll would have loved, their respective business ventures mesh.

Wandering through commercial listings on the Web, I discovered the virtual White Rabbit just as Christmas shoppers were crowding the corporeal White Rabbit up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Bob was a technohusband par excellence. He designed the toy store online, claimed just the right address on the World Wide Web (http://www.toystore.com), wrestled with the technical issues, and helped take orders from customers, the first of whom lived in Brazil. JoAnn would pay Bob in his favorite currency: teddy bears. The big question was: Will they make any money at it? I electronically hung around their virtual store and chatted with Bob on the phone as the season progressed.

He and his wife were among the thousands of small business people who were trying new marketing paradigms on the Net, where the denizens hated intrusive huckstery but might take to electronic catalogues.

Compared to most other business people on the Internet, the Lilienfelds were quick studies. You could type an electronic address into your computer and see a White Rabbit logo and a greeting from the toy store in several languages. Then you clicked your mouse on the proper area of your screen and opened up a colorful catalogue with not only blurbs but also pictures of tops and puzzles and wooden toy trains of the kind your parents might have bought for you. Most of White Rabbit’s offerings were classics that you would never see at Toys ᴙ Us.

Bob and JoAnn Lilienfeld wanted their business to stand out. Soon their electronic forms might let you type in the age of your child, information about his or her interests, your budget, and other constraints. You would instantly receive tips on what gifts to buy. Even now, you could order online without talking to a human—not as heartless as it might sound, if you simply valued your time and telephone money. The electronic forms could even calculate the postage.

White Rabbit intrigued me, and others felt the same way. Within a few weeks of my first visit, they got calls from the Wall Street Journal and the Detroit Free Press. Some reporters had caught on to the obvious: While Hollywood and Washington were off prattling clichés about the overpriced medium called interactive TV—while Al Gore was cracking jokes on stage with Lily Tomlin during an entertainment summit disguised as an “information” one—entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies were trying ads on the Net. The Internet often narrows differences between large and small businesses. Even little ones can reach global audiences and, through well-planned Web areas, look like giants to customers in Rio or Tokyo. New cybermalls sprout up to get technophobic companies online by providing both technical and creative services. Corporations fight over addresses for the Net. Stanley Kaplan, a service that tutors students for academic examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, sued a competitor that stole the name kaplan.com. A writer for Wired magazine mischievously claimed McDonald’s name, which the hamburger chain hadn’t yet registered. Such oversights, however, were rapidly becoming the exception in an era when prime Web sites made the pages of Newsweek.

Even electronic hookers (“We go all the way”) were on the Internet—in fact, operating under the name “Brandy’s Babes.” They plied their trade from Arizona, the same wild and quirky state from which Canter and Siegel enraged the Net. And yet, if you cast the usual moral questions aside, the Babes seemed to be exemplary citizens of cyberspace. Not just hypesters, they posted specifics like prices, bust, hip, and waist measurements, and preferences in men. “No beards,” a Babe warned customers. “Employed men only.”

Unlike the hardsellers, the Babes did not inflict unwanted ads on thousands of newsgroups. And in line with the two-way traditions of the Net, they solicited messages from customers—dirty ones that the Babes might charge good money to answer. You could even dial up Brandy’s and see a live Babe at her computer with her impressive bosom exposed. The gig lasted several zany months. Fear of police raids grew, however, even before the ayatollahs in the U.S. Senate ranted against net.sex. I finally saw just a blank screen except for a laconic message alluding to “bad links.”

Separately a condom store was online as well. It offered medical information, supplied tantalizing odds and ends on such topics as “The Size of a Man’s Pony,” and wittily answered questions from appreciative readers. Like Brandy’s, it operated in a nonintrusive way.

The World Wide Web was also a virtual home for thousands of more conventional businesses such as the manufacturer of a toy gun that shot Ping-Pong balls, a city’s worth of bookstores, Godiva chocolate, and Ragu spaghetti. None other than the Home Shopping Network bought out a Net retailer specializing in computer equipment. Pizza Hut went online. And the United States was hardly alone in this trend. The Singaporeans were competing in the cyberpizza race—Shakey’s Pizza was girding to take orders, via a fax-Net link, from hungry scientists and students at the National University of Singapore. A large Irish bank advertised on the Net. So did the Royal Bank of Canada. It mounted a bilingual Web area for both English- and French-speaking customers who, once past the first menu, didn’t have to clutter their screens with material in the wrong language.

Some of the old technical barriers, of course, remained even in rich countries: most hardware was still rotten for doing home shopping. What the customers needed, and what Silicon Valley could not yet provide, happened to be small, affordable, sharp-screened computers that could colorfully show off the merchandise. The main way to look at the Net was through Mosaic-style programs. And even at 28.8 kilobits per second—the highest speed possible through widely available modems—it took too long to go from page to page of electronic catalogues. The biggest problem was the software installation, which could be tricky. Although software such as Internet in a Box simplified the matters, the Net was not yet TV-easy to use.

Even so, some companies were designing inexpensive gadgets, which could sell for mere hundreds of dollars, that would allow people to surf the Internet on their televisions. I hated the idea of anyone reading text off a blurry television screen. But at least the powers of the computer world were finally thinking of the Internet as a real, live marketplace. Just as important, Prodigy, America Online, CompuServe, and rivals were preparing to let customers reach Web sites from their proprietary networks.

Microsoft was planning point-and-click Internet capabilities for its Windows 95 operating system. And it had bought stock in a key Internet provider and would be linking its own network tightly with the Net. Advertising Age estimated the number of people able to access the Web itself—the best place for Net advertising—at several million at the start of 1995.[^[2.2]] And that number might push past 11 million by 1998, according to a report from a Massachusetts research firm.[^[2.3]] So, even if Internet merchants aren’t advertising in the most consumer-oriented of places right now, they might well be awash in new business later on.

The existing denizens of the Internet were more technical than the people on, say, Prodigy or America Online. Some software companies used this to their great advantage. A good example was Cyberspace Development Company, which had created an extraordinarily useful program called The Internet Adapter, or TIA. Most Net people couldn’t enjoy Mosaic-style viewers because their network connections did not allow this. But TIA let even Netfolks with $18-a-month accounts use Mosaic and other marvels. And to buy TIA, they did not have to go to a retail store.

If technically savvy, they could pick it up on the Internet itself. A digital key, transmitted via e-mail, allowed only authorized customers to use the publicly available files. Skeptics could try a test version of TIA for a few weeks before paying for it by check or credit card. Because of the low cost of distribution and, in my case, the lack of need for full consulting services, I spent just $25 on a product that might have cost a good $50-$75 if sold at the usual store. And by normally using a basic hookup with my Web software—as opposed to a deluxe, time-sensitive one—I could save hundreds of dollars a year.

The benefits of the Internet, for the Cyberspace Development Company and me, didn’t stop there. Via discussion groups, TIA sellers kept us customers up to date, and just as important, we could share tips among ourselves. We could also use the World Wide Web to catch up with long documents; in fact, updated versions of TIA could travel to us over the Net. All of this, including the elimination of the need to go to the store, was taking place on commercial networks such as CompuServe. But the costs would have been greater for Cyberspace and customers alike if the company had to pay the usual commercial rates for electronic mail.

Among the wares talked up online were upbeat prognostications about the Net itself. For $3,500 you could buy a report from a California consulting firm that said annual commerce on the Net and commercials services such as CompuServe would reach $600 billion by the turn of the century. I was skeptical. Merchants like JoAnn Lilienfeld would have to sell warehouse after warehouse of stuffed animals or toys or whatever the offerings were. In fact, $600 billion was a good 8 percent of international commerce. On reflection, however, the estimate from Killen & Associates seemed possible. Through the Net you might find a buyer for shipload of scrap iron or an office building, not just a stray teddy bear in need of a child. I phoned Mary Cronin of Boston College, who had written a well-regarded book called Doing Business on the Internet. It teemed with examples from Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM and many other computer-oriented firms. And she had researched it before most business people grasped the importance of the Internet. Yes, she said, the $600 billion figure sounded credible if you counted business-to-business transactions.

Daniel Dern, an Internet consultant, had his own opinion on the statistics. He said the Net was like the highway. Just what did you count—all the goods that went over the road? The combined salaries of the people on the way to work? I could see his point.

Whatever the exact numbers, the demographics and technology might be on the side of the many retail businesses if they stuck it out on the Net and kept expectations realistic. Scads of people in Generation Net were about to marry. They would buy houses and cars and whatever else mattered beyond stereos and Internet-optimized computers. Just in the late summer and fall of 1994, the number of Net-related businesses on the Web had doubled, and a good many of the newcomers were not technical. Could the Net really, then, enrich business people without technical backgrounds? Was there indeed money in what had once been the province of cash-strapped college students and dreamy researchers?

Plenty of people thought that the answer lay in the case history of Grant’s Flowers, which, like White Rabbit Toys, operated out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Larry Grant had been a cover boy in an enticing article on the front page of the business section of the New York Times; the Internet pulsed with chatter about the electronic coups that he supposedly had achieved for just $28 a month. Excited Netfolks reported that he did not even have to type to his customers on the Internet; new orders just poured in on a fax machine with a Net connection. The California gold rush was almost a century and a half old. And yet, watching the Grant legend take off, I might as well have been among the boots and beards at Sutter’s Mill.

So I talked not only to the Lilienfelds but to Larry Grant, the legendary florist himself. Many in the media were still enchanted with the Electronic Frontier metaphor, and I remembered the old films about Davy Crockett, the Tennessee frontiersman who loved corny jokes, bear-wrestling tales, coonskin hats, and Crockett-friendly news accounts—the grist for Walt Disney later on. What was next, a movie epic with a musical tribute to “Larry Grant, king of the Net frontier”?

A market might indeed be ballooning for cyber-retailers, as the hypesters said. But I still wondered about the present. What counted was not all the puffery about 30 million Netfolks, many of whom can only read electronic mail as opposed to seeing roses or toy tops or other merchandise. No, the real determinant was how often people dial up your particular site and bought. One well-crafted Web area, which advertised technically related goods, enjoyed just a handful of visits in six months without a single sale. This was an issue aside from the total amount of business done on the Net. Having talked with Mary Cronin and others, I hadn’t any doubt about those giant commodity transactions and all the use of the Net by Big Business to automate the paperwork of commerce. But what about the small fry? Was the excitement about Grant truly justified? I’ll answer those questions in the pages ahead, where I’ll return to the Lilienfelds and to Grant, and where I’ll examine the following:

• MCI, the phone company. It has provided thousands of miles of Net connections and now rents out electronic storefronts on the Net. MCI offers one of the slickest Web areas—complete with a fictitious publishing house (now evolving into a real one) that accepts manuscripts from real readers. Advertising Age has hailed the MCI site as “unquestionably the best Internet marketing effort to date.” Frustratingly, however, while preparing to dispense advice on cyberspace, MCI in early 1995 was committing some of the very mistakes it should be telling its customers to avoid.

• Federal Express, whose Internet presence shows the potential of the Net for business-to-business transactions, not just the consumer variety. Ironically the people at FedEx in some ways were demonstrating more Net savvy than MCI was at the time, even though the Internet was more in the territory of the latter. The old values of customer service still reigned above all else. A smaller competitor of Federal Express, a shipper called Right-O-Way, was also making outstanding use of the Net. In some ways it was even staying ahead of the big boys.

• Intel, the chipmaker, which learned the hard way how good the Internet was for spreading news of flaws in products. The Net abounds with skeptical academics and consumerists with fast typing fingers.

• Other hazards of the Internet for business people. What if you set up an electronic storefront like the Lilienfelds’ and then a manufacturer decided to cut out the middle people and sell on the Net directly or through a larger outlet? Security is another threat. While I was writing NetWorld!, most commercial areas on the Net lacked a way to protect credit card numbers. Hackers broke into General Electric’s Web area and stole corporate secrets. Another risk is competitors looking over price lists and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of products.

Those caveats will end the chapter. By far, the Internet is a positive rather than a negative factor for business and customers alike. Wired consumers will reward good companies, punish the losers, and spur the winners to do still better.

Bob and JoAnn Lilienfeld: The Net as a

Way to Promote Small Businesses

Thousands of miles to the south of Ann Arbor, home of White Rabbit Toys, Luciana Gores was reading a popular mailing list called Net Happenings. It was a kind of town crier. Each day from North Dakota a man named Gleason Sackman sent out informative posts on the many new services that were springing up on the Internet.

Gores worked as a network expert, and she was already used to buying technical books through the Internet, which offered a far greater variety than what she would find in her own city, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

She was also the mother of a seven-year-old named Lucas. So when the mailing list told her of White Rabbit, she checked it out on the Web.

People who visited the virtual store, or at least those with the right equipment, saw a logo with the rabbit from Lewis Caroll’s imagination. They also conjured up a color picture of a real toy store with shelf after shelf of tot pleasers, a tiny table and stool on the floor, and a look of friendly chaos—in short, a shopper’s delight for children and parents alike, which in fact the “real” White Rabbit was. The traditional store, the one at 2611 Plymouth Road, had thrived. Now Bob and JoAnn Lilienfeld were trying to woo virtual customers such as Luciana Gores. Their electronic White Rabbit just may have been the first full-service toy store—as opposed to one-product billboards or specialty shops—to open up on the Internet.

An ad on the opening screen helped set the tone for Luciana Gores and other customers of White Rabbit: “We specialize in high-quality toys that help children to create, learn, imagine, and explore. Our toys come from all over the world. We offer such international favorites as Brio (Sweden), Ravensburger (Germany), Primetime Playthings and Creativity for Kids (United States).”

Suitably equipped customers could actually see pictures of the toys, including a Ravensburger game called the A-maze-ing Labyrinth. “Travel the corridors of the enchanted labyrinth in search of treasures,” read the carnival-like pitch. “But watch out! The walls shift, and the passages can close, leaving you trapped! For ages eight and older.” Lucas was a year younger, but did it matter if the child was as bright as his mother, the network expert? “It seems to be an interesting game,” Luciana Gores e-mailed me, “and it won a Parent’s Choice award.” And so she paid her $24.95 and shipping, which, given the light weight of the toy, was modest.

Thanks to the Internet, the Lilienfelds suddenly had the whole world as a market, not just customers living near by. The fact that White Rabbit was in a university town, with graduates all over the planet, could only help. So could the fact that the Internet was expanding overseas even more rapidly than in the United States.

White Rabbit also appealed to Stuart Lowry, another promising kind of customer—the computer jock turned family man. A Maryland resident in his late twenties, he wouldn’t have made the pulses of marketers quicken several years ago; he was a grad student then at Johns Hopkins University and, like many people on the Internet, had more time than money. But that had changed. Lowry now worked at Computer Science Corporation, a large defense contractor, pulling down a salary in the mid-forties. He was married and lived in a townhouse, and four months ago his wife had given birth to a baby boy. And so, when Lowry was cruising the Internet from work and spotted a notice announcing White Rabbit Toys, he favored it with a virtual visit. He ordered a colorful toy top for $13, the Floor Spinner from Primetime Playthings.

Many people on the Web were young males more interested in pizza or condoms than in baby toys, but the Lilienfelds were looking ahead a few years when the same Net people would be parents. “It’s an act of faith,” Bob Lilienfeld said. “Today’s demographics and selling a lot of toys on the Net may be out of synch. But today’s college students are tomorrow’s parents. Tomorrow’s parents aren’t going to consider ordering by computer any different from getting in a car and going to the shopping center.”

Other trends might work in the Lilienfelds’ favor. More and more Americans were time-short, with long commutes; Stuart Lowry himself spent forty-five minutes each way, and that actually was a quick trip compared to those in cities such as Los Angeles. In northern Virginia I knew of parents rising at 4 A.M. to go to jobs in Washington some forty miles away, and not a few of them were high-tech workers who would sooner or later end up on the Internet.

When I reached Bob and Jo Ann Lilienfeld in the middle of November, White Rabbit itself had been on the Net maybe a week and had enjoyed around 1,000 virtual visits in that time. They were hoping that these numbers would multiply as Christmas neared. It was too soon to tell how many of these people would actually order. Back in June, though, the Lilienfelds had grown excited after reading about Larry Grant in the New York Times and elsewhere.

“I saw this figure of 20 million Net users,” Jo Ann said of the numbers du jour, “and thought there’s definitely an opportunity here. But I didn’t want to go about it in a half-baked manner. I thought there had to be someone who could combine knowledge of the Net with marketing experience.” She checked out a local cybermall and found it wanting in the latter area.

That wasn’t surprising, given Jo Ann’s perfectionism and eagerness to avoid easy but far-from-satisfactory solutions—whether in retail or life in general. She had grown up in a cash-short household where, more often than not, the children would get out the oatmeal cartons and construction paper and scissors and cobble together their own toys. And the same creativity had carried over to her Bloomies days as one of the resident experts on Christmas tree trimmings. According to the Lilienfelds, it was JoAnn who came up with the idea of selling leafless, white branches. She and Bob had moved to Ann Arbor because he kept flying off to the Midwest to consult for clients in Midland, and they felt that married people needed to spend more time together. JoAnn went about establishing the White Rabbit just as conscientiously.

Not finding the right toys for her own children, she studied the demographics of Ann Arbor to verify that a toy store could thrive there. She concluded that in a university community, many would love those wooden train sets and other classic toys as opposed to the trendier offerings that were touted on television and sold at Toys ᴙ Us. Ann Arbor responded well. A local paper told how she blessed her store with a public bathroom—how she kept diapers and spare wipes around for the parents of children and emergencies. No need for toilets existed on the Internet. But even at this early stage, having read up on the Netfolks, she was attuned to the need to adapt to the culture of cyberspace.

JoAnn finally decided that her best savior, the requisite miracle-worker with both Net and marketing experience, lived right there in the Lilienfeld household. Those past few months her husband had been succeeding off a mix of garbage and the Internet.

To be exact, Bob Lilienfeld was advising clients about future garbage, the packing materials for consumer products, a major contributor to landfills. He hadn’t anything against recycling. But thanks to his work at Procter & Gamble, he had concluded that the best way to cope with waste was to design packages to avoid it in the first place. Manufacturers and customers alike would win. Bob would go on to help put together a network of likeminded consultants, including William Rathje, a world-famous garbage expert at the University of Arizona who had co-authored Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Lilienfeld met Rathje at a press conference but also found himself relying on another source of contacts, the Internet. Again and again he had heard about the Net from professors at the University of Michigan, and he soon was in touch with other garbage mavens around the planet.

“I started sucking in information,” he recalled. “I found out about mailing lists and newsgroups, and then I decided I would put my newsletter up on the Net and see what happened.” The newsletter was a way to let clients know about his consulting company, the Cygnus Group. It helped Fortune 500 companies, other businesses, trade associations, educational groups, and others grow more sensitive to environmental concerns in activities ranging from packaging to marketing.

Just as JoAnn was careful to befriend Ann Arbor in the right way, Bob tried to honor the conventions of the Net—avoiding hucksterism in favor of helpful information. The announcements about the newsletter were low-key, and response was good. Soon he was sharing his articles with hundreds of Netfolks who asked such questions as: “I recently saw an article on compact fluorescent light bulbs in Consumer Reports. Why aren’t more stores and utilities selling them?”

An “Ask Bill and Bob” column, cowritten with William Rathje, revealed that such lights “take at least eight times more energy to produce than old-fashioned bulbs. And they’re heavier, so they use more energy during shipping.” The column also told of an experiment that McDonald’s was conducting in Albany, New York, with food and paper composting, saving perhaps 500-700 pounds per week of solid waste. Readers could learn, too, that a nut seller was moving from glass and plastic bottles to vacuum bags.

Bob Lilienfeld was hardly an eco-activist by the standards of, say, Greenpeace; Dow Chemical was among his prime clients, after all. But he was serving up information for people with many different viewpoints, and by way of the proper clicks with your mouse, you could travel from his Web site to areas of the Internet such as the Envirolink Network, or EcoGopher, or EcoNet.

His newsletter, known as The ULS Report (short for “use less stuff”), carried an item about CD-ROM disks. It described them as “an environmentally friendly way to reduce waste and save resources. One CD-ROM, including packaging, weighs under half a pound. The 22 books that it replaces weigh 70 pounds.” Knowingly or not, he was helping to pave the way for the virtual White Rabbit—where the same principles applied. Via the Internet, White Rabbit could advertise to thousands without printing up catalogues for them. Oh, they might request catalogues later, but then they would have prequalified themselves, reducing the solid waste. Lewis Carroll would have approved of the reasoning here. What’s more, unlike paper catalogues, Lilienfeld could update his electronic catalogue to change prices or play up the fastest-selling merchandise.

The World Wide Web was the main way to put White Rabbit on the Internet. Once merchants on the Net would have favored a service called Gopher (as in “go-fer-it”) in honor of the mascot at the University of Minnesota. Gopher displayed text very well and needed less bandwidth on the Net than the Web did. But it lacked the pizzazz of the Web-Mosaic combination; that is, the ability to conjure up pictures and even sound so easily. Although Bob used Gopher for digging up scholarly works about the environment, it was like black-and-white television while Web-Mosaic was color and all the more alluring for commercial purposes.

Getting White Rabbit on the Web was surprisingly cheap in some ways. The Lilienfelds’ network provider charged JoAnn just $50 a month, plus $2 an hour for when she was using electronic mail or handling other chores. That didn’t include Bob’s time, however. He knew at least the basics of the necessary programming language and didn’t require the services of a consultant to the extent that others might have.

Net.business, 3D-Style

You can’t touch merchandise on the World Wide Web. But the next best thing may be in store.

Virtual reality will let you “walk” through Web businesses and see merchandise in greater detail as you get “closer” to the object on your screen. You can vary the angles, too. So you could use your mouse to tour a parking lot of automobiles. You could spot the Volvo or the Saturn of your dreams, and admire not only the outside but also the interior.

No, the Web will never replace actual shopping in most cases, but virtual reality will be increasingly good at helping you screen preliminary choices.

Keep an eye out, then, for WebSpace—the new 3D viewer from Silicon Graphics, the California company whose technology helped create many of the special effects in Jurassic Park. WebSpace will work as an add-on with popular Web browsers such as Netscape and Spyglass Enhanced Mosaic.

WebSpace-style technology, needless to say, is far too good to waste on shopping alone. Virtual reality software for the Web may also help you tour the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, or Mount Kilimanjaro—not to mention Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro.

3D technology could revolutionize the financial world. Small investors, not just high-powered stock analysts, could “see” stock market trends. Your screen might display a “Bulls’ Corner” with a collection of corporate logos color-coded according to the improvement in the stock price. You could open up the logos and go on a tour of various divisions, wandering around them electronically with far more ease than you could with less advanced software.

Similarly, at the suggestion of your broker, you could tour a Bear’s Corner and see why you might avoid or sell off certain shares.

Mind you, there are negatives. Corporations—whether stores selling merchandise or companies seeking investors—may use this slick technology to fool the public. On the other hand, the Internet is already a godsend for consumers and small investors. Via Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists, they can swap information, taking care of course to look for plants from companies trying to sway grassroots impressions.

Lilienfeld himself put in most of the set-up hours. It took him a few days of programming to design the Web site and scan in the pictures of more than two dozen items—the train sets, the puzzles, the tops, the blocks—and like an old-fashioned art director he had to create within the limits of the medium. The big problem was photos. If they were too big to move over the Net quickly, then the peeved readers might give up and go on to another Web site. If too small, however, the pictures would lack enough detail to show off the store or the merchandise. In many cases Bob would let readers click on pictures of bears to see larger versions of the photos.

He also had to worry about the software the readers used on the Internet—certain Mosaic-style browsers would show smaller objects first. Other challenges arose. What if technical standards changed so that only certain browsers would work with Bob’s site? The real White Rabbit might be a victim of acts of God such as the ebb and flow of automobile traffic, and the virtual Rabbit needed to worry about patterns of Net traffic, but it also could be subject to Jehovah in the form of macho software firms who wanted everyone on the Net to use their brainchildren.

Companies such as Netscape Communications Corporation actually gave away Mosaic-style products to us Netfolk for free, hoping to make fortunes instead off the software that merchants and others denizens on the Web would run. Netscape was the champ in late 1994, the one that let you go from page to page faster than any competitor did. Many people feared Netscape would be to the Web what Microsoft was to software; suppose Netscape used technical prowess and marketing skill to trample competitors, and maybe overcharge the customers.

A green monster named Mozilla came up on one of Netscape’s welcoming screens, and pessimists wondered if the company itself might someday play the part. Marc Andreessen, the top software designer at Netscape, had led the team that came up with the original Mosaic at the University of Illinois. And then he had left Illinois to join a new company that, from the ground up, had designed the speedier Netscape product. The Web community mightily hoped that Mozilla and keepers would behave themselves. Suppose that Netscape joined Microsoft or credit card companies to build in special, billing-related features that users of other browsers couldn’t use?

Netscape, however, seemed benign so far, and the browser’s technical wizardry[wizardry] was winning many friends. With a click of the mouse, for example, you could scoot smoothly from the Web to the usual newsgroups, and Bob Lilienfeld took advantage of this. He set up his computer system so that customers with the proper software could whiz directly from White Rabbit to child-related newsgroups.

One moment you could be shopping for toys; the next, exchanging tips with a New Zealander or Norwegian on how to cope with tantrum-prone babies. You could zip to misc.kids (“A great place to swap parenting war stories”), misc.kids.consumers (“Help with purchasing decisions”), or misc.kids.computer (“Enough said!”). Or you or your children could read odds and ends about wombats, Forester kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, fish, lions, dinosaurs, and other creatures at WombatNet; print out drawings of the human heart or the stars or hear a thunderbolt by way of the Franklin Institute Virtual Science Museum; and learn the population of Uganda or Afghanistan via The CIA World Factbook, a guide assembled by the real-life Central Intelligence Agency.

Fighting the companies such as AT&T and the big cable interests, many activists likened the Internet to a series of communities with opportunities for small merchants and citizen-to-citizen communications as opposed to couch potato offerings from the Fortune 500. Merchants such as the Lilienfelds were acting out the very models about which the activists waxed so enthusiastically.

Bob Lilienfeld understood that just as storekeepers in a small town would do well to join the Kiwanis Club, virtual storefronts should be part of Net life. JoAnn would soon go to a toy convention, and at some point, she might well share her impressions with the denizens of misc.kids and similar newsgroups, as opposed simply to touting her products. At the same time, yes, by way of a signature at the bottom of her posts, people on the Net could find out about the toy store. She might even start a mailing list for the receptive. Bob had already shown the success of this model by way of the list and other tools used to promote his consulting activities.

A toy-oriented list could be much more than ads. “Going shopping isn’t just spending money,” Lilienfeld observed, “it’s[it’s] a social phenomenon. It’s seeing people you know, it’s being part of a crowd.” And it’s also picking up gossip and maybe even solid information. “Ultimately the toy store will be bigger than just a toy store,” he said. “We might be providing information on child development, of the appropriateness of certain toys or coloring books. If you’re a model train hobbyist, we might be able to help you hook up with model train users groups.”

In fact, by way of the mouse-activated links from White Rabbit to newsgroups and other Web sites, he was already offering much more than just a store. The line between merchants and information providers was blurring in the case of Bob and JoAnn; the higher the quality of the information at White Rabbit, the more it would be a virtual gathering place for people on the World Wide Web. I wasn’t surprised to hear some people say that librarians might be the star sales reps of the future. It wasn’t hype. Information, not just prices and selection of merchandise, would be what drew Netfolks to sites such as the Lilienfeldss’ . Of course Bob Lilienfeld might want to be choosy about what links he listed. If he listed too many of the mediocre ones, then he would simply be replicating the function of the powerful search programs on the Web and adding to people’s “information overload,” to use an ever-popular phrase.

Software already let sophisticated Netfolks zero in on items of interest. Merely by typing in the word “toys,” for example, I could find scads of listings—from mentions of adult sex toys to the Web site advertising the gun that fired Ping-Pong balls. And these programs would soon be simple enough for even technoklutzes to use. So the Lilienfelds had better offer something that the software could not supply: Their judgments about which Web sites, newsgroups, and mailing lists were the most fun or most informative.

All through the Christmas season, JoAnn kept refining her Net-related plans. “We need to ask, ‘Have we chosen the right items?’” she said. “The draw of our toy store is, it’s an exciting place to shop. We have to do the same on the Internet. If we add more items, it will approach a catalogue more. Right now our competition is mail-order catalogues, and we have a lot of items that they’re not offering. Maybe we’ll be reaching people not on the traditional catalogue list. They could be more occasional toy buyers than frequent toy buyers.”

Thanks to a computerized inventory system, JoAnn’s corporeal store carried more than 6,500 items. Bob made a mental note: He might want to put more of them on the Net so customers would enjoy a wider selection. JoAnn talked about her suppliers: “My goal was really getting this up and going for Christmas. When I get to the toy fair I’ll discuss this with the national sales managers and see if I can’t get discounts for advertising to so many people, and then we’re working probably toward next Christmas. We’ll be working toward fourth quarter of ’95.”

That was a healthy attitude. Even toward the end of the season the number of visits didn’t go past 2,000 a week, and only a handful of actual sales resulted. The only customers were Luciana Gores; Stuart Lowry, the computer jock turned family man; Michael Wolfe, a West Virginia professor studying Internet commerce, who ordered half a dozen stuffed toy caterpillars; a second academic, in the Midwest, who bought a Ravensburger Snail’s Pace Race game; a Massachusetts woman sending three customizable dolls to her sister (“I’m testing business on the Net—aren’t you lucky?”); and David Fry, the operator of a cybermall nearby who was curious about the White Rabbit, and who bought First Blocks.

Not that the Lilienfelds had completely wasted their time. As of Christmas, a Wall Street Journal story hadn’t appeared, but the Detroit paper and others had gone ahead with articles, and customers poured onto the floor of the real White Rabbit, one even buying the giant polar bear that Bob had been hoping to give his nine-year-old son. The publicity may have brought in some $20,000-$25,000 in extra sales by Bob’s estimates, on which the Lilienfelds may have netted around $2,000—compared to $750 gross and $75 net from Net orders. Bob told me that other merchants on the Web were also reporting a low number of sales. The week before Christmas the number of visits to White Rabbit itself actually declined; many of the prospective customers had been logging on from school or work, and now they had partly emptied the Web along with their dorm rooms and offices.

From a get-rich-quick perspective, then, the virtual White Rabbit had been a zero. Bob and JoAnn were smart marketers with MBAs from a Big Ten business school, and he had a real feel for the Internet, which he had successfully used to expand his consulting business. But even the Lilienfelds could not score right away. Oh, how tantalizing the gargantuan numbers had been—the tens of millions of users said to exist; the million by which the Net was supposed to be growing each month. And yet in the end, when the time came for customers to key in the credit card numbers, the market had vanished like the Cheshire cat. That didn’t mean the Lilienfelds were foolish; just a week or two after Christmas, a wonderful twist happened. The number of visits to the toy store fell off. But sales leapt up. By mid-January White Rabbit was moving an average of a toy a day—not a Kmart volume, but an improvement. Bob explained the difference. Now White Rabbit’s first screen told customers that the store could often get toys not mentioned online.

Encouraged, Lilienfeld added yet another improvement, an 800 number. Now customers could ask their questions the old-fashioned way if they preferred, and they could also order by voice if they didn’t trust the Net with their credit card numbers.

With enough tweaks like this, the virtual toy store might eventually flourish as the number of Web users grew. Just like the characters in many children’s stories, the White Rabbit would keep on changing—adding ever-more-intriguing links to newsgroups and other Web sites, putting in the software to help novice toy shoppers choose just the right ball or train set, figuring out new ways to use the interplay between the Net and the traditional media. Sooner or later, the Netheads would reproduce, and when they went looking for rattles and Lego sets, Bob and JoAnn would be ready for them. The story of White Rabbit Toys, like that of the Internet itself, was far from over.

The Electronic Billboard: Grant’s Flowers

Larry Grant just might be doing better at the moment than the Lilienfelds were. He was selling flowers, and what better merchandise existed for grad students who were alone at the keyboard in a dark office at two o’clock, and who had forgotten their girlfriends’ birthdays?

A newsletter publisher named Rosalind Resnick—a former staff reporter for the Miami Herald and the author of an Internet business guide—was grossing more than $20,000 a year in subscriptions and expecting to do much better in 1995.[^[2.4]] And her media-oriented newsletter helped pave the way for a lucrative consulting business. I also knew of a network expert named Gordon Cook who was able to jet to a three-week research expedition in Moscow at his own expense, and who lived satisfactorily on the revenue from The Cook Report on Internet and related activities.[^[2.5]]

Grant’s Flowers, however, was more of a typical business. Larry Grant wasn’t a writer. And his work was not as network-related as that of Resnick and Cook; unlike the latter, he hadn’t evolved into a net.personality on some key mailing lists. Instead the word was that Larry Grant just paid his $28 a month to an electronic mall—a collection of stores that shared a common subarea of the Net—and sat back and watched his fax machine spew out orders. Grant might not be Davy Crockett in terms of action, but certainly in terms of fame he was coming along. He had appeared as a success story, after all, on the front page of the New York Times business section.

As I wended my way through the Net to Grant’s Flowers, I passed through an area called Branch Mall. A logo with a tree branch greeted me. I saw listings for enterprises ranging from cosmetic sellers to H & H Logging and Timber Company. Under “Flowers, Gifts, Foods,” I didn’t see just Grant’s listing. I saw White Dove Flower and Gift Shop, Flowers on Lexington, Exotic Flowers of Hawaii, Bonsai Boy of New York, and half a dozen others. Bob Lilienfeld was skeptical about cybermalls, and right now I could see why. With all this competition, could Grant’s make money off the Internet?

Lilienfeld had reminded me that traditional malls and the cyber variety were different, and I understood. If I wanted to shop for books, I could brave traffic to reach Springfield Mall, a large collection of shops maybe ten miles from me in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Springfield would be worth the drive. I could visit four stores right within a five-minute walk of each other—Brentano’s, B. Dalton, Walden, and Crown.

The Net, however, was also different. I didn’t have to drive anywhere. I could just use a powerful search engine such as Lycos, key in “bookstore,” and watch name after name pop up on my screen. Lycos demanded just a little technical savvy. But easier alternatives would come along. As if that weren’t enough, Netfolks put together lists of activities on the Internet, and often they included commercial categories. I’d found White Rabbit not through advertising but through the Yahoo list out of Stanford University, on the other side of North America. Distance just didn’t matter. So could the shopping mall metaphor truly work out to the benefit of merchants such as Larry Grant?

Branch Mall at the very least had set Grant up in style. The opening screen was attractive and helpful to buyers, with such basics as: “Different areas of the country sometimes have different prices or may be unable to supply certain flowers. For example, New York City has high rents and costs of doing business, so flowers are more expensive there....” And then below I saw a list of the offerings—for example, “One dozen boxed long stem roses. A fragrant classic. $49.95 to $99.95.” In the virtual version of the White Rabbit toy store you couldn’t rattle the toys, and in Branch Mall you couldn’t smell the roses, but like the Lilienfelds, Branch Mall had been generous with pictures of the merchandise. I loved some little touches. Branch had given Grant a reminder service into which you could key your spouse’s birthday or some other date, before which an e-mail note would be sent to jog you to do your duty.

The selection was varied. You could order everything from the roses to “a get well soup cup containing button mums, daisies, mini carnations, standard carnations, monte casino, statice, and a package of chicken soup. $26.” All in all, I felt that this area was even better laid out than White Rabbit Toys, where the opening page, though far, far above average, didn’t communicate quite as much information as I’d have liked. As with White Rabbit, you could order online by filling out an electronic form.

Missing from the virtual version of Grant’s flower shop, however, were the customized links that helped give the White Rabbit Toys its personality and made it a true part of the Net. If Larry Grant had been as at home in cyberspace as Rob Lilienfeld was, he could have added links to love-oriented discussion areas or to poetry—perhaps even the Shakespearean variety.

But instead this Web page was serving just as an electronic billboard with an ordering mechanism. I didn’t even see a photograph of the store. When the New York Times published a photo of a Mosaic screen, it had superimposed a picture of Grant amid his flowers and dressed in an apron with an FTD insignia. Couldn’t a similar photo have adorned his Web area?

For that matter, the store didn’t even offer an electronic mail address, just a phone number for customers with questions. This isn’t to criticize Larry Grant. He was not an honorary techie as Bob Lilienfeld was. Like Lilienfeld, however, Grant was an intelligent, diligent Midwest businessman who saw the Net as an opportunity.

Wild talk about Grant notwithstanding, he wasn’t a braggart—simply a proud family entrepreneur. I learned that Grant’s Flowers was actually part of a mini local conglomerate. “We’ve been here since 1947,” he said, “and my folks started farming and selling produce by the side of the road off a kitchen table. We’re now a million-dollar business and have many facets. We have a flower and gift shop, and the front of the building is beer and foods. We farm 131 acres.” Two brothers were in the business, and so was his eighty-year-old mother. “She runs the flower and gift section, and I run the rest of the retail sales and my brothers do all the growing and production. We’ve got two acres of greenhouses growing plants for spring sale or gardeners. It’s a very diversified operation.”

Grant clearly wasn’t making a living off the Internet alone, despite a good start. “We got online in February just before Valentine’s Day and we received forty orders that week. In the first ten days we had over 2,900 look in on our electronic storefront. Then it dropped to one or two orders a day, and then we got to Mother’s Day and had a high of forty in one day. Currently we’ve increased from one or two to six, in that range.”

When I asked what his current Net-related gross would be per year, he roughly estimated it at perhaps $15,000 or $20,000. That was enough to make the Web area well worth his time, but this was hardly a tale of instant riches. I remembered a magazine ad—for would-be providers of Internet services—that showed a mustached man beside a Rolls or Mercedes. Larry Grant was a Web merchant, not someone hooking people up with the Net. But I wished that the get-rich-quickers of all stripes could see Larry Grant as a realistic example of the Net’s promise. The gold might come eventually, and it was worthwhile to chase after it by going online, but, for most people, the big money wasn’t there yet.

What’s more, costs for newer customers of Branch Mall were higher. Grant had been the first merchant there and enjoyed a break. Now Branch was charging thousands a year for Web areas that included elaborate programming and creative work.[^[2.6]]

Larry Grant, in any event, believed in the Net and in the Mall itself. His virtual operation wasn’t costing him that much, and I suspected that even with somewhat higher expenses, other tenants might do fine in the end if they were in the right business. “Number one,” Grant said, “we don’t have to take and buy more inventory. Number two, we don’t have to have a bigger facility. And number three, we don’t need a sales staff. We can do with the staff we have in handling these orders. It’s a neat way to find new business. I don’t have to handle any of the products directly. The customer does all the ordering through the company in his area and it’s shipped from the company to them, and I get my commission check at the end of the month.” He liked the concept so much that he started a Fuller Brush franchise on the Net. The same key principles applied: No inventory to worry about and no sales staff, just some dealings with Branch and orders emerging from a fax machine.

Merchants like Bob Lilienfeld might fare well without a cybermall involved—they knew how to spread word about themselves on the Net by way of newsgroups and mailing lists—but I could also see the possibilities for people such as Larry Grant as long as they kept their expectations to a reasonable level. Grant himself didn’t view the other flower shops at Branch Mall as direct competitors; he depicted himself as more of a general florist than the others, what with their specialties in Hawaiian flowers and the like. Certainly a good cybermall, like the brick-and-concrete version, needed a good tenant mix—with a toy store not appearing on the same screen as, say, a sex toy shop.

If that right mix wasn’t around, why have the mall in the first place? While it was true that the Net shrank distances, it did take time to move from screen to screen at typical modem speeds. And yet, reflecting, I could indeed see a future for malls. Even when search engines were easier to use, people might still not avail themselves of them—preferring to browse instead. So the mall concept might well endure to the advantage of people like Larry Grant.

All kinds of people itched for their percentages of the cybermall business. Jon Zeeff, the mall operator who had set up Larry Grant with his electronic billboard, had once written medical software. David Fry was a Harvard Ph.D. in computer science, came from a family in the printing business, and ran an offshoot called Fry Multimedia. Ann Arbor wasn’t Silicon Valley, but just in that one university town, at least three local business people were on the Web in a serious way, if you included Bob Lilienfeld. Like him, Fry wisely thought in the long term. Drumming up business from well-known brands such as Ragu spaghetti sauce, he did not promise an instant audience in the millions. He urged companies to go on the Web, experiment with interactive advertising, and make their mistakes before the Net became a truly mass medium for Madison Avenue.

Some get-rich-quickers, of course, also were jostling for virtual tenants; even Canter and Siegel showed up by way of an area called Cybersell, and I enjoyed the irony. C & S had carpet bombed thousands of newsgroups with the same message—while encouraging other merchants to ignore conventional Netiquette—and yet now they were also relying on the more focused approach of a Web area.

Phone companies, too, wanted to run malls on the World Wide Web. And that created problems for some. While the Net might use their phone lines, many of these corporations felt out of place in an anarchistic environment over which they had far less than the accustomed amount of control. In the mall business they would be competing against nimble entrepreneurs like Zeeff and Fry. Still, phone companies could take advantage of their existing networks to one extent or another, and if the Yellow Pages were going online in a new incarnation, then the Baby Bells and AT&T wanted their share of the business. Of all the mall-related efforts in early 1995, the most ambitious may have been from a phone company, MCI. It exemplified—as I soon discovered in the most direct of ways—both the best and the worst of Big Business on the Web.

MCI’s Giant Cybermall and the

Search For Darlene

MCI and the Internet had A History. The Net used phone lines from many companies, but MCI had long been one of the major players here; some 40 percent of the Internet traffic in the United States passed over its cables, and nowadays the senior vice-president of data architecture was none other than Vint Cerf. As much as anyone he was Mr. Net, one of the founding fathers. MCI also employed the head of a standard-setting body called the Internet Engineering Task Force. Unsurprisingly, MCI marketers were coming out with statements in the vein of: When you think Internet, we want you to think of us.

I asked a product manager how much of the Net-related commerce he could envision involving an electronic marketplace from MCI. Well, he said, MCI had around one-fifth of the long-distance business in the U.S.—and why not the same share on the Internet?

Clearly, however, if MCI wanted to woo the Larry Grants of this world, it faced a major marketing problem. Just like Jon Zeeff, it would have to sell business people on the Net as a vehicle for their messages; and that meant lots of education, not just hype. MCI, moreover, was offering a range of services far, far broader than Zeeff’s. In an MCI-perfect world, you would advertise your business by way of marketplaceMCI. Prospective customers on the Net could browse through a giant online directory and follow a link to your electronic storefront. MCI would cleverly lure them to its area. People would be able to retrieve voice phone numbers in far-off cities and enjoy other information services for free.

On MCI’s planet, you’d of course use internetMCI for your electronic mail and your Web browsing. You also could hold video conferences during which people saw not only each other but the same contract or spreadsheet, which they could jointly modify even if they were thousands of miles apart. You could even receive updates on your pet news topic by way of MCI—just the ticket for keeping up with competitors or with a favorite athletic team.

Not all of MCI’s new services related to the Internet. But like marketplaceMCI, many did. And even with 30 million people hooked in by way of e-mail if nothing else, public ignorance was massive. Larry Magid, a computer columnist, observed that even a single TV show such as Home Improvement could attract greater numbers. If MCI wanted to enjoy volume befitting a phone company, then, it had better prepare for some major evangelizing—about both the Net and non-Net services. MCI tried the broadcast model in the most traditional of ways. Splashy commercials aired on national television. They starred a fictitious publishing company, Gramercy Press, whose president, Peter Hoffman, had a big crush on MCI. Whether the service was video conferencing or electronic mail, Hoffman was itching to open his wallet for it.

Darlene Davis was the character with the most air time, the hip young receptionist who was waging a valiant battle to get Martin Banks, the resident technophobe, online. If this portly old crank of an editor wanted to read the latest memos from Darlene, then he had better plug in his computer. Curtiss Bruno was the sales manager with his heart on his quotas and Darlene. MCI’s electronic services could allow him to achieve at least the former goal. Nowadays Darlene happily used e-mail to help stay out of flirting distance with him. Ellen deRosset was the resident intellectual snob and a Net browser. Reginald Gales used MCI’s news feature to keep Martin up on cricket scores. Marta Dragelov was an info junky in keeping with her duties as a fact checker.

In a country where fantasy and reality often turned into one big mush, where O. J. Simpson movies could go into production before the end of the murder trial, where legions of commercials aped news programs, where the Speaker of the House would soon be hosting a cable TV showing of Boys Town after having touted orphanages as a major solution to the welfare problem—in a nation like this, it was as inevitable as a $1 million book deal for O.J. that the mythical Darlene would draw job offers and marriage proposals from people wanting to be part of the fun.

“These were breakout and breakaway characters that took on a life of their own,” said Mark Pettit, the MCI public relations man who was handling Gramercy matters. What’s more, the company’s advertising agency, MVBMS, hadn’t just tried to make Gramercy real in the real world; the agency people had also made the characters real in the video world by way of an introductory commercial that looked like a preview of a new fall series.

Having conquered TV, then, and with the Internet a main focus of the ad campaign, how could MCI not have opened up a Web area to ballyhoo the same services that Darlene was pushing on the tube? The commercials had whetted interest in the characters. And now MCI would see if it could satisfy this curiosity while also passing on more details about its new line of services. “People wanted more than thirty seconds of information,” Pettit said, “and it can be hard to give them more on TV. What if we turned this into a real place that they could go visit? And that’s how it came to life.” By MCI’s own estimate, more than a million people visited the “real place” in the first six weeks or so. Even Bob Lilienfeld dropped by. He was an MCI stockholder and wanted to keep an open mind despite his skepticism about the mall concept—maybe he could do business with pros like MCI’s. Lilienfeld filled out a form that offered a two-month trial of Net-related services, and waited.

I first visited the Gramercy Press around the same time that Lilienfeld did. The site popped up on my screen with color photos of a perky-looking Darlene and friends. I saw a red logo, too. A small “GP” appeared between “Gramercy” and “Press,” a nice little touch that a real publisher might have tried. I wondered what ambitions MCI had. Might it turn the fictitious GP into a commercial publisher someday? The screen said Gramercy was “The World’s First Virtual Publishing House,” and across the top I saw color photos of Darlene and friends, all looking as real as ever. If I’d been impatient for a hard sell, I could have clicked immediately on items such as “networkBusiness” or “MCI Telecommunications, Inc.”

But like the rest of the cosmos, I was more keen on reading some virtual gossip from virtual humans. In a primitive way, reminiscent of many a best-seller, a teaser led me on. I learned that the people of Gramercy were “working on secret projects, curt memos, random thoughts, Machiavellian power plays,” and that I might “even browse a clandestine love letter or two about to be sent via e-mail across the corridor.”