What the Internet might have looked like

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab had it right in 1995, in his book, "Being Digital." He viewed the World Wide Web in a straightforward, uncluttered way, describing a new media world in which content no longer went out to the audience (the expensive, inefficient "broadcast" model), the audience came in to the content (it would only be files in a computer). He predicted the Internet would be a "spoke" system, like telephones, as opposed to a "loop," like cable companies. He said bandwidth problems would be solved by the replacement of telephone's "twisted pair" copper wiring with fiberoptics.

He even saw a new business model, in which Internet content providers, such as journalists, would be paid by the hit, or pageview. Each time a consumer visited the journalist's story online, the journalist would receive two cents. The Internet communications world that Negroponte envisioned was relatively simple, totally achievable, and utterly believable.

But the simple solution, in a revolutionary shift like the Internet, easily gets diverted, complicated, clogged up, slowed down, and damaged, sometimes irreparably, by the inevitable corporate question, "What's in it for me?" America Online (AOL) is a leading example. As an access route to the Internet, AOL in 1995 had no reason to exist; all a person needed was a computer, a modem, and an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Once connected, the user moved about the Internet with free browsers such as Netscape. It was a simple A to B connection, but AOL managed to position itself between A and B, and sell memberships. It was a business model based on the ignorance of the audience. Other business models looked like interventions but were actually fierce resistance being put up by traditional media providers who saw the Internet as a threat to their old and lucrative way of doing things.

Simplicity quickly became the finger in the Internet dike, and all those business models blew right on through. It's hard to say how badly interventions like these may have deflected, damaged, and retarded the growth of what, in the beginning, looked like a simple, but magical, system that achieved its revolutionary effect by doing nothing more than turning around the direction of information by 180 degrees. Instead of progressing directly from A to B, the Internet lurched through a long and cluttered Web 1.0, iteration into a Web 2.0, and now seems to be trying to find its way into a Web 3.0. Tuesday morning, The Wall Street Journal in a special "Journal Report" section, summed up an All Digital Conference – the seventh annual – held last week in Southern California with such names as Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Carol Bartz of Yahoo, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, and cable TV mogul John Malone. Their mission: to look at the Internet in 2009, "trying to figure it out." A fine time for that.

What they are trying to figure out is: "How do we get paid?" Nicholas Negroponte had the gumption to address that question in 1995: payments will move through the Internet in tiny amounts and accumulate dramatically through a multiplier effect. His Internet reporter of the future would be paid two cents for every visitor to his story. Given a global circulation, and it is a good story such as you might see in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, the reporter might reasonably expect 200,000 visitors. The reporter earns $4,000 for the story, and we consumers have gotten our two cents' worth. At last. But first, there is all that business model wreckage to be removed.