Sham + Scam = Shame

The Net came up from the sinister and murky

background of the Cold War, but managed to keep a decent profile at that time. Then came

the World Wide Web, which magically transformed what was essentially a long-distance

information carrier into a conglomerate entity which catered to various walks of life,

like entertainment, education, research, business, and ubiquitous email. It promised to

enhance your communication, make it easy for you to get information at a mere click of a

mouse, and even help you make money by hawking your wares online, for millions to see.

But one important thing it really

achieved-through spin-off concepts like the intranet-was to enable the user community,

reeling under the blows of open proprietary (forgive the odd oxymoron) systems, to break

free. It was more than just a Utopian world-like some new-age God, it proved that it was

equal to all, and that all were equal to it-of course, people with 128 Kbps ISDN links are

always more equal than users with 14.4 Kbps modems, but that apart, the Net proved that it

did not exactly give too much of a damn about what you actually used to connect to it. At

long last, a dumb Unix terminal, with poor little text-based Lynx, was nearly equal to a

200 MHz Pentium Pro equipped with Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer (IE)-ok, ok, we

are stretching the point a bit, but you get the general idea, don''t you? though you could

not get any fancy graphics with the former option.

And then, all hell broke loose. The

mandarins of IT, to their exquisite horror, realized that the only thing worse than not

getting your prayers answered was getting them answered. Of course, they wanted systems to

be open, but not that open. But Lord Internet had spoken, and there was not too much they

could do about it, right?

But the champions of the desktop era, the

dreaded Wintel combine, comprising the wily Windows-enabled Microsoft and the infinitely

monopoly-hungry microprocessor giant Intel decided that even Lord Internet could be

thwarted. After all, they were the ones who stood to lose the most in case the Net

remained non-proprietary-suddenly, it no longer mattered weather or not you had a Pentium

Pro running Win95 and IE, right?

Therefore, the two companies decided that

the best thing to do was to ensure that the Net became proprietary. Understandably, that

was how they had made their big bucks in the desktop era-Intel gets a chip that runs

faster, and Microsoft designs a fatware hog-OS which justifies the existence of the chip,

and all hardware and software vendors had a sweet time selling ''updated'' versions of their

PCs and software packages.

The first to move stealthily into the murky

depths of the Net was understandably Microsoft, which designed the official Star Trek site

to be accessible only if you are running IE on

Windows-use any other OS or a different browser, and sorry, you can''t say ''Beam me up,

Scotty''. Even First Officer Spock, known for his macabre infatuation with logic, would

have disapproved of this (do we hear Dr McCoy loudly protesting to Captain Kirk in the

background?)

With Microsoft on the nasty, can it be long

before its dear long-and-never-lost friend Intel catches up? Recently the chip juggernaut

was seen in very bad light indeed when it tried to persuade some web publishers to provide

so-called ''optimized content'' (ah, what words they use these days!) which essentially

means that you get enhanced performance on Intel''s latest chips, but get slow delivery on

other chips. Pray, are those who use non-Intel chips, or refrain from joining the mad

upgrade rush children of a lesser God?

Intel and Microsoft are not the only ones

to blame, but they are the most prominent, and, most importantly, they are the ones who

have started it all. The point now is not how bad Intel and Microsoft are, the issue is

how can one stem the rot. Obviously, one cannot install MS IE to access the Star Trek

site, and use Netscape Navigator to access Citibank. Customers need to be allowed the

right to decide. As Sun''s Scott McNealy said in a different context some time ago, do you

want freedom of choice or freedom from choice?

Today, it is high time that we got up a

good committee to handle such issues. True, we have the IETF (Internet Engineering Task

Force), the W3C (WWW Consortium), and other Internet governance bodies, but of what use

are they if they cannot ensure the presence of an open Internet? It is, therefore,

imperative that somebody takes the mandate of setting up a single governing entity which

encompasses all the functions of the Net, from doling out domain names to engineering the

bandwidth acceleration of the Internet''s backbone. True, it is a tough task, but can we

allow the likes of Microsoft and Intel to run rough-shod over us on the Internet, the way

they have done on the desktop?

Is Lord Internet listening?

BALAJI N,



in Bangalore.