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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (10963)	6/10/1999 5:08:00 PM
From: David Harker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

All - here is a good explanation/discussion of the Oregon decision, from the Motley Fool board: fool.com one snippet: "From what I have read of the defendant's views, I have the impression that the intention is simply to cut ATHM out of the loop. Therefore, no revenue will be generated, and no ATHM assets will be used. Therefore, the ISP connection must be downstream of both the ATHM backbone and the local cache servers. That is, it must be closer to the client side than ATHM's assets. Now, this is a gross simplification, but it seems to me that to be able to offer the same level of service as ATHM any competing ISPs will have to own or have access to a backbone equivalent to ATHM's, AND local cache servers. The latter are very interesting, because they imply a very wide need for accommodation to house the machines. I do not believe that is in the power of the Local Franchise Authorities to demand co-location of competitors equipment on the MSO premises. This would mean that in addition to using the incumbent's cable, ANY ISP competitor would be able to position a headend server in the MSO's building. I cannot imagine this happening. As for the former, an interesting paradox appears in the case of AOL: AOL has sold off its own network to WCOM, which would presumably be the real beneficiary of a move to broadband by AOL because of the traffic increase (Sun would also benefit because the host servers would need to handle increased traffic and respond faster, and I think AOL's servers are Sun these days). Local cache servers would be a very odd commodity for AOL to outsource to WCOM, so I would assume that they would own and control these directly. Yikes. Suddenly, even with the network outsourcing arrangement for backbone, AOL needs to support a much wider geographical distribution of servers. Is this really plausible as an option, given that AOL concentrates on content? Of course, the alternative is for the competing ISP simply to have a direct local (downstream) connection to their existing network. The effect of this will be to reveal the utter inadequacies of existing ISP networks for broadband use (I include AOL in this generalisation). ATHM will harvest customers from competitors through the sheer quality of their service in comparison. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this is why there are no cable ISP competitors in Canada, despite open access (see ATHM's SEC filings for consideration of this as a risk factor)."