Wall Street Journal (paid registration required): In Battle to Control the Internet, Microsoft Emulates Its No. 1 Enemy. Microsoft Corp. is trying to wrest control of the Internet from America Online — again.
Who said AOL controlled the Net to begin with?
But the premise, if wrong today, is a real threat. Both AOL and Microsoft are clearly trying to wrest control over the first truly democratic mass medium from the people — from you and me.
Understand this clearly. The big players do not want us to have any say in what happens to the Net. They want us to behave like good little boys and girls and take what they feed us. They want a read-only medium where the only interactivity on our part is putting in our credit-card numbers and buying stuff.
This is a terrifying, if predictable, course of events. Big business has always tried to control technologies that might threaten their business models. But in the age of code, when Microsoft and AOL and Sun and IBM the other giants make decisions behind closed doors — decisions that will determine what kind of Net we have — we have to ask the most important question of all.
What can we do about it?