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Fifteen years of epochal pronouncements

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In 1994 Louis Rossetto cranked up HotWired and believed he was ushering in the professionalization of the Web. It was time to rout all the anarchists and the hackers and the amateurs who thought the Internet was all about self-expression (and them). “The era of public-access Internet has come to an end,” he declared. He didn’t mean that the public would no longer be able to access the Internet, of course; he was drawing an analogy to public-access TV. Just as that once-promising avenue for citizen media had been eclipsed by the pros of the cable world, so, he reasoned, the Web would similarly leave the amateurism of its youth behind.

Nick Carr believes this is still going to happen, but many of us today understand that the opportunity the Web affords all of us to add to it lies at the heart of the medium’s identity. It’s not some minor feature of the medium’s youth that will be sloughed off as maturity arrives. It’s not some incidental efflorescence of excess creativity that will vanish once the laws of supply and demand kick in. It is what makes the Web tick. You can try to ignore that, and use the Web as a mere replacement for paper and trucks, but why bother? You will lose your readers and your future.

I thought of all this as I read reports today of Rupert Murdoch’s pronouncement that “The current days of the internet will soon be over.” Phrased that way, the prediction makes it sound like the end times are near. But the only apocalypse in sight, I’m afraid, is that of the old-line news industry, if it insists on pursuing dead-end subscription models for general-interest Web products.

There is money to be made on the Web for the providers of information, but it will never be made by locking away generic news and opinion articles and charging subscription fees to access them. Cutting your content off from the rest of the Web in this fashion robs it of its Webbiness. It’s like a movie producer in the 1930s saying, “Hey, let’s make talkies!”, but then turning off the sound in the theaters.

Murdoch, and any other publisher who shuts the gates, may well boost his bottom line in the short term. But in the medium term and beyond he is simply guaranteeing the slow decline and ultimate irrelevance of his publication. This is painful for journalists and media execs to hear, but they need to hear it — just as, back in 1994, Rossetto needed to hear that no, actually, “public access” was exactly what the Web was all about.

Yesterday, AOL/TimeWarner; today, Twitter and…

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There’s a ridiculous amount of chatter in the tech blogosphere about who’s going to buy Twitter. And if the right offer comes along with enough zeros behind it, I don’t doubt that Twitter will sooner or later sell itself. But I doubt its founders are going to do it any time soon. Industry veterans understand that the day you sell your company is the day that innovation ends and “value extraction” begins.

Evan Williams knows that since he lived it. When Google acquired Blogger it secured the service’s future and insured its growth to the household name it became. (One of the many tales told in Say Everything…) But you didn’t exactly see Blogger pushing the boundaries or adding exciting new wrinkles. The innovation was done.

Google, being Google, didn’t rush to extract value. But that’s what we’re seeing now with MySpace and News Corporation. Having invested in the social network because of its market share and buzz but with little idea how to make money with it, Rupert Murdoch is now impatient to ramp up the revenue. The competition over at Facebook — still independent and still run by founders — is more focused right now on adding features and figuring out what their service is all about than in raking in the dollars. If they sell now, they know they’re likely giving up further explorations of what Facebook is (explorations that today are underwritten, to be sure, by investors who hope someday to cash out).

Meanwhile, the granddaddy of this sort of deal — the great AOL/Time Warner merger of 2000 — is receiving its final interment this week with the announcement that Time intends to fling the old albatross off its neck in a spinoff. When it was first announced, that combination was hailed as “the deal of the millennium,” but none of the people involved really had a clue about the future — not the AOL executives who shrewdly sold off their business at the peak of its market value, and certainly not the Time Warner execs who very quickly realized the two companies had absolutely no business combining forces.

AOL was never a hugely innovative company, but it was good at getting people online quickly and easily in the early days of the Web. Maybe it had a future doing the same thing in the broadband era. But from the moment AOL sold itself to Time, it ceased being a force of any consequence on the Net and began a long, slow downward slide from which it has never recovered, and from which I doubt it ever can — even with ex-Googler Tim Armstrong at the helm.

Reading about the spinoff this week reminded me of one of my most amusing experiences during the dotcom bubble. In January 2000 I was a new dad with three-month-old twins at home; elated but sleepless, I was running on caffeine and adrenaline. When I woke up to news of the AOL deal I rubbed my eyes and banged out a very quick column raising some questions about it.

Later that day I got a call from some producers at CNN asking if I would go on the air to talk about the deal. I thought, yeah, sure, as long as I can keep my eyes open… What I realized once the anchorperson started asking me questions was that I’d been cast as the deal’s Dr. Doom. In retrospect I think I was perhaps the only pundit they could get in front of their cameras who wasn’t convinced that the deal was going to reshape the Web world.

I saved video from the show. Here it is:

“What’s the problem?” indeed! I can’t claim any astute prescience; I couldn’t foresee just how quickly the boom would go bust and the deal would turn sour, and I worried more about big companies trying to strangle the Web than, in retrospect, I needed to. But I knew a fear-driven deal when I saw one and was in no mood to cheer what looked like the blind mating dance of clueless media barons.

It’s good to remember that today as the chorus on the sidelines starts chanting for new matches. They rarely work — and even when they do, they usually mean that the fun is over.