The Business Internet and Intranets:

Extract (2): Introduction - The Internet as  Relationship Space

This makes it dangerous to generalize from one space to another or to assume, for instance, that explosive growth in the flow of information across the Education Internet means a corresponding increase in business purchases of goods and services. It's even more dangerous to assume that the sheer size of the physical Internet translates to market size and that growth in its use translates into business growth.

Firms basing their Business Internet strategies on what they see happening on the Total Internet are almost sure to make increasingly expensive mistakes because the specific, constituent relationship spaces differ so greatly. The Political Internet, for example, is driven by debate and information-sharing, with Internet Usenet discussion group forums as the main vehicle for this. Political groups from the extreme left to the extreme right demand freedom of expression on the Net and are largely very opposed to any idea of outside control over it. For the Business Internet space, Usenet is of minimal interest and value, but security, and in many instances new regulations and laws for controlling transactions and payments, are as vital as they are antithetical to the users on the Political Internet.

The Education Internet similarly places a premium on access to information and open communication. Its community tolerates the many traffic jams on the Net that prevent access to particular servers at peak times, but it is very sensitive to cost, to the degree that most of its members will not pay even a few cents for information, because for them the Internet has for years been a source of free data to be browsed for and downloaded. By contrast, the Business Internet community must have reliable and immediate service, for which it is generally willing to pay a premium, and it is looking to sell some information as well as to give some away.

The Entertainment Internet focuses on multimedia, with very few financial transactions; for its community, multimedia tools are central, as are issues of cost, time demands, and quality in downloading music and video; they require massive bandwidth (the basic measure of telecommunications carrying capacity, measured in bits per second). Multimedia demands far more bandwidth than today's standard phone lines can provide. By contrast, most Business Internet transactions use low bandwidth, and to date the rule of thumb has been to minimize any multimedia traffic, such as video, that will slow down the interaction between company and customer.

The differences between Internet spaces are - not can be, but are extreme. This is demonstrated by two unrelated concerns widely voiced in the mid-1990s. As a business manager, as a citizen, or as a parent, would you at the very same time (1) actively seek to preserve the legal rights of pedophiles to use the Internet to proselytize and contact children while being protected from government and police interference in doing so, and (2) equally actively object to any form of commercial advertising on the Internet, to the extent of joining a worldwide venture to drive it off the Net? Almost certainly not. Yet, many people on the Internet are ready to organize as a community in support of their own values of, first, freedom for the Net from any form of censorship and, second, preservation of its non-commercial nature.

In 1996, a local prosecutor in Bavaria, Germany, ordered the national telecommunications company, Deutsche Telekom, and the U.S.-based online information service, CompuServe, to remove access to bulletin boards and discussion groups that contained sexual material. (Many CompuServe subscribers use it as a gateway to connect to the Internet.) The prosecutor was explicitly concerned with the protection of minors. CompuServe's solution was clumsy; the firm installed software that scanned the system looking for words such as breast, inadvertently censoring several women's discussion groups about breast cancer. In any case, within a few days, volunteers had set up more than two hundred mirror sites on the World Wide Web to provide copies of the censored material. (CompuServe's actions did not settle the matter. In April 1997, the Bavarian state prosecutor indicted the head of its German operations on charges of aiding the dissemination of child pornography and permitting access to games containing images, forbidden under German law, of Hitler and of Nazi swastikas.)

By contrast with this immediate response by netizens (Internet citizens) against a threat to free speech, when two lawyers in 1994 broadcast an electronic mail message across many of the Internet's UseNet discussion groups (a practice called "spamming") advertising their services, the mainstream Internet community was outraged. Again on a volunteer basis, people went to great lengths to organize a campaign of vilification against the pair, overloading their Internet access service provider's computer with so many abusive messages that it could not handle the overload and canceled the lawyers' subscription.

The Internet is highly differentiated. But it is also a space with a strong anti-business bias. The following quotation from Daniel Burstein and David Kline, writing in their book Road Warriors, captures this quality well.

Free. Egalitarian. Decentralized. Ad hoc. Open and peer-to-peer. Experimental. Autonomous. Anarchic. These words make up the lexicon of the cyberspace frontier, and it is remarkable how closely they parallel those which once described America's last frontier, the Old West of the nineteenth century.... Notice, however, how sharply these words contrast with the hard-headed vocabulary of business and commerce: For profit. Hierarchical. Systematized. Planned. Proprietary. Pragmatic. Accountable. Organized and Reliable. There is more than simple word play here. There appears, in fact, to be a core conflict of values between the basic nature of the Internet and the demands of organized, large-scale commerce. One side or the other must give. ⁴

It seems more accurate to say that both sides must coexist. But businesses need to recognize that Internet business is not business on the Total Internet in terms of values, priorities, interests, or, above all, relationships.

_{4 - Daniel Burstein and David Kline, Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway (New York: Dutton, 1995), 105.}

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