The Wild West

Citation

Heap, J. (2001), "The Wild West", Work Study, Vol. 50 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2001.07950baa.001

The Wild West

The Wild West

Over the last 12 months there have been a number of interesting events, which are either encouraging or disappointing depending on your individual standpoint. However, they do offer pointers to the development of new commercial models that will affect us all.

The Napster phenomenon (and its eventual accommodation of Napster into the mainstream commercial world) is one such event. As the whole world (or at least the connected part of it) knows by now, Napster is both a technology (of peer-to-peer connected PCs) and a service that allows users to share their own CD collections with others over the Internet. Thus, many of its users have a massively increased music collection at very low cost (the telecomms costs associated with connection and download) and with no royalties paid to the musicians or their record companies. Not surprisingly, the music companies viewed this "model" with alarm and went to law to protect their valuable property. Eventually, after much (expensive) wrangling, the companies decided it was better to co-operate with Napster and have agreed with the turning of Napster into a subscription-based service where a portion of the subscription is used to compensate the record companies. One for pragmatism and the new future, perhaps.

Other events include the releasing of a whole raft of new domain name suffixes to ensure a steady growth of Net organisations. The cyber squatters reacted very quickly and many of the potentially popular names with the new suffixes were snapped up, presumably with the intention of holding potential owners to ransom before releasing the name.

Then there was the seemingly constant stream of dotcom failures, as organisations struggle to find ways of making money from e-commerce.

All of these remind us that the Internet – as a source of commerce – is very new and people are struggling to come to terms with it. It is the new frontier – and the Internet, e-commerce pioneers are taking the risks that the early US settlers did – not with their lives, perhaps, but with their fortunes.

The Napster situation reminds us that at frontiers, new laws have to be developed and policed. The cyber squatters remind us that there are always those that will exploit new frontiers for their own ends – using the absence of those "new laws" to conduct activities that may not be illegal but most would decry as unethical. The dotcom failures confirm that the vacuum of a frontier often sucks in those who should take more care – and more thought. Not all ideas are good ideas.

There are those – Napster users among them – who feel that the Internet offers the chance to change some of the accepted ways of doing things. However, the power still largely rests with the "big guys" – as the outcome of Napster shows. Napster has been absorbed – and will, presumably, end up as a polished, sophisticated service. Will it then succeed commercially, or will it be undermined by new Napsters, operating on the edge of the law?

Before this frontier is tamed, we will certainly see a few more "shootouts". It may be messy, confused and slightly dangerous – but the Internet is an exciting place to be.

John Heap