Features

net.wars: Second acts

Reviewing the big names of 2009 versus the big names of 1999 for ZDNet UK last week turned up some interesting trends – trends which there wasn't space to go into. Also worth noting: still unpublished is the reverse portion, looking at what the names who are Internet-famous in 2009 were doing in 1999. These were: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Rupert Murdoch, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

One of the trends, of course, is the fact that there were so many women making technology headlines in 1999: Kim Polese (Marimba), Martha Lane Fox (Lastminute.com), Carly Fiorina (running – and arguably nearly destroying – HP), Donna Dubinsky (co-founder of Palm), and Eva Pascoe (a media darling for having started the first Internet café, London's Cyberia, and writing a newspaper column). It isn't easy now to come up with women's names of similar impact in 2009

You can come up with various theories about this. For example: the shrinking pipeline reported ten years ago by both the ACM and the BCS has borne fruit, so that there are actually fewer women available to play the prominent parts these women did. As against that (as a female computer scientist friend points out) one of the two heads of Oracle is female.

The other obvious possibility is the opposite: that women in prominent roles in technology companies have become so commonplace that they don't command the splashy media attention they did ten years ago. I doubt this; if they're commonplace, you'd expect to see some of their names in common use. I will say, though, that I know quite a few start-ups founded or co-founded by women. It was interesting to learn, in looking up Eva Pascoe's current whereabouts, that part of her goal in starting Cyberia was to educate women about the Internet. She was, of course, right: at the time, particularly in Britain, the attitude was very much that computers were boys' toys and few women then had found the confidence to navigate the online world.

The other interesting thing is the varying fortunes of the technologies the names represent. Some, such as Napster (Shawn Fanning), Netscape (Marc Andreesen) and Cyberia, live on through their successors. Others have changed much less: HP (Fiorina) is still with us, and Palm (Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins) may yet manage a comeback. Symbian has achieved pretty much everything Colly Myers hoped.

Several of the technologies present the earliest versions of the hot topics of 2009, most notably Napster, which kicked off the file-sharing wars. If I were a music industry executive, I'd be thinking now that I was a numb-nut not to make a deal with the original Napster: it was a company with a central server. Suing it out of existence begat the distributed Gnutella, the even more distributed eDonkey, and then the peer-to-peer BitTorrent and all the little Torrents. Every year, more material is available online with or without the entertainment industry's sanction. This year's destructive industry proposal, three strikes, will hurt all sorts of people if it becomes law – but it will not stop file-sharing.

Of course, Napster's – and contemporary MP3.com's – mistake was not being big enough. The Google Books case, one of the other big stories of the year, shows that size matters: had Brin and Page, still graduate students with an idea and some venture capital funding, tried scanning in library books in 1999 Google would be where Napster is now. Instead, of course, it's too big to fail.

The AOL/Time-Warner merger, for all that it has failed utterly, was the first warning of what has become a long-running debate about network neutrality. At the time, AOL was the biggest conduit for US consumer Internet access; merging with Time-Warner seemed to put dangerous control over that access in the hands of one of the world's largest owners of content. In the event, the marriage was a disastrous failure for both companies. But AOL, now divorced, may not be done yet: the "walled garden" approach to Internet content is finding new life with sites like Facebook. If, of course, it doesn't get run over by the juggernaut of 2009, Twitter

If AOL does come back into style, it won't be the only older technology finding new life: the entire history of technology seems to be one of constant rediscovery. What, after all, is 2009's cloud computing but a reworking of what the 1960s called time-sharing

Certainly, a revival of the walled garden would make life much easier for the >deep packet inspectors who would like to snoop intensively on all of us. Phorm, Home Office, it doesn't much matter: computers weren't really fast enough to peek inside data packets in real time much before this year.

One recently resurfaced name from the Net's early history that I didn't flag in the ZDNet piece is Sanford ("Spamford") Wallace, who in the late 1990s was widely blacklisted for sending spam email. By 1999, he had supposedly quit the business. And yet, this year he was convicted of 14,214,753 violations of the CAN-SPAM anti-spam act and told to pay Facebook more than $711 million. How times do not change.