Good Morning Frank and all,
To my naive and parochial little mind, an ISP is a provider of services that enable a flexible entrypoint onto the Internet and support its customers' generalized and customer-defined Internet and related communication needs. I think that AOL has proven itself to be the antithesis of such a concept.
It seems to me that AOL is a provider of "on line services", but that its corporate philosophy is totally opposed to the "dumb network with control and determination at edges" concept. Their philosophy is quite reminiscent of the Bellhead approach in that it asserts that they (AOL) are the only ones that can determine what the customer needs and that they must make the customer's decisions for him and protect him from the dangerous (and no doubt useless) unrestricted and unfettered net access. They apparently feel that the customer (and I mean both individual and business) must have everything laid out before him with only a restricted, AOL-determined, narrowly-defined glimpse of the real network world. Their apparent view is that the Internet is just a small, hopefully minimal, sub-service requirement of their AOL-defined customer-available online environment. They clearly are a bbs service. They clearly are a large advertising billboard. They clearly are a self-promoting site of e-commerce, but other than in their own minds, it would seem hard that, from a "networker" viewpoint, they could be called a real ISP.
To me, a real ISP provides basically unrestricted and generalized gateway access to the Internet. To me, a real ISP is one that accepts the inevitability of the migration of needs-definition and control to the edges. To me, real ISP's will continue to move further toward their being enablers of the network and being offerers of services, rather than being restricters or determinants of services. To me, real ISP's will continue to blend into the network interiors and become "utility-like" (in the good sense of the word) in the universality of their offered services. To me, real ISP's will be looking at ways to enhance and measure their incomes through parameters related to data flow and the value of the data flow itself, rather than from being an active participant in or the principal of each transaction. Every one of these things is something that IMHO is antithetical to the AOL-is-the-center-of-the-universe and AOL-knows-what's-best-for-you philosophy and culture.
What really worries me is that AOL is doing things like buying Netscape, the prior embodiment of customer network access enablement. It's hard to believe that the Netscape-like philosophies will survive the marriage (or, to probably be more correct, the adoption).
I may have an unduly prejudiced viewpoint on AOL's AOL-centered, restrictive philosophy. I know that it's hard for me to note an AOL address on a business or on an an individual that one has come to respect, and not saying to myself "Why are they on AOL?".
Apologies to all AOL'ers, but I said at the outset that I was naive and parochial.
Have a great holiday,
Steve
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