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Rupert Murdoch buys Delphi
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1993-09-08
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2KB
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49 lines
John Markoff reports in today's New York Times (9/3, p.C1), under a
header running "A New Information Mass Market",
"Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Delphi Internet Services, a gateway to
the global Internet computer network, may be the clearest indication
yet that businesses are eager to tap into a remarkable market that is
growing at almost a million new customers a month."
Rupert Murdoch?! Notice that Markoff calls it a "market", and uses the
dreaded term "customers". What happened to the friendly little Internet
of bubble-gum-chewing ponytailed teenaged hackers in tennis shoes, and
bulletin boards about where to find used bicycles in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Acceptable "academic" Use Policies? In case you
hadn't noticed, it's dead. Murdoch is not interested in used bicycles:
his News Corporation plans "to offer many of its newspapers and
magazines in electronic form over the Internet." This announcement,
says Markoff, "was one of many moves lately that are helping to lift
the stock of the News Corporation."
Continental Cablevision also will be going through PSI Inc., "the
largest private provider of Internet services", to "offer hundreds of
thousands of telecommuters connections to the Internet via
Continental's cable network". "It is the fear of being late to the
party," Markoff perceptively comments, "that has communications and
publishing companies rushing to repackage their products in digital
form for the new information economy." Remains to be seen, in other
words, whether all this rush will be good for the rushers'
stockholders; but the rush certainly is on.
I don't think libraries realize it. The government certainly doesn't:
the NII / National Information Infrastructure is beginning to look
dangerously like the closing of the barn door after the horse has
bolted, particularly after the enormous commercial activity shown at
Interop last month. Libraries will be dealing with a digitized
information world -- digitized fulltext, digital new releases, online
access to everything, a general inability to _find_ anything -- well
before anyone ever predicted, from the looks of what Mr. Murdoch and
Continental Cablevision and many others already are doing on the
Internet.
Jack Kessler
kessler@well.sf.ca.us
____________________________________________________________________
espen aarseth aarseth@uib.no