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To: E. Davies who wrote (12869)	7/22/1999 8:23:00 PM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Cable Telephony to Penetrate Over 10% of Homes Passed by 2005 Full story at strategisgroup.com Cable telephony subscribers will grow from 50,000 to almost 11 million by 2005, according to a recently released report by The Strategis Group. The report, Cable Trends: 1999, also projects that cable modem subscribers, numbering 420,000 at the end of 1998, will grow to over 8 million by 2003.

To: E. Davies who wrote (12869)	7/22/1999 10:10:00 PM
From: Islander99	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

PS One good thing I have noticed lately is that every news report I see finally realizes that what "open" means is government regulation. Respectfully, I would suggest that both "open" and "closed" mean government regulation. The government regulates by choosing to intervene (open) or not (closed). And what's the big deal, anyway? Government has always regulated cable services (and telephone services). I just want the company to grow and I would not exclude the seemingly contradictory possibility that ATHM will grow better with "intervention" than not. --Islander (who owns both ATHM and AOL)

To: E. Davies who wrote (12869)	7/22/1999 11:05:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

"Not being a member of the original internet society I personally dont see anything wrong with the commercialization of the internet. Face it, the opportunity to earn money drives people to create things they never would have had the motivation to otherwise." Eric, I see that I wasn't clear. I never mentioned the pros or cons of greed, per se, much less imply that greed in itself was intrinsically responsible for any of the conflicts that we are discussing here between the MSOs, ATHM and the ISPs. You jumped to the wrong conclusion, I'm afraid, but some of that was my fault. Before I clarify myself concerning what I intended to convey in my previous post, let me say that I should have been more aware that soap box-ing about Internet values here would not be a good idea. To appreciate such requires a background in the history of the philosophical chasms between the IETF and ITU regimes which have prevailed over the past thirty years, while the 'net has had time to grow up. Anyway, it's wasn't actually "commercialization" in the singularly purest sense of the word as you interpreted it [actually, I've always inferred that it means "to conduct commerce over"]. Rather, it was the service provider-specific and massively uncoordinated bastardization of an open standards-based architecture that I was referring to. Here, the only commerce that is being engendered is the business of the service provider community itself as they seek to differentiate themselves, and not that of the end users being enabled to partake in commercial activities, themselves. From a user perspective, one could still make piles of money and fulfill their basic instincts of greed without the service providers having to resort to exclusionary practices amongst themselves while creating isolated islands of connectivity in the process. The latter has the effect of stranding users, which by the way, obviously does nothing for the advancement of commerce on the 'net. The reasons for this haven't really demonstrated themselves yet, because the 'net is still being used today for only the most basic forms of http and ftp functions, at least primarily and in the main. But this will change as the service providers begin making available their dozens of ways to send IP telephony and VoIP (which, by the way, are not the same things, where IP Telephony favors a truer form of TCP/IP delivery model, and VoIP seeks to emulate the PSTN), and the other enhanced services which are supposed to supplant the PSTN at some point over the next couple to five years. Using the 'net for commercial traffic is a natural outgrowth of its being, and I wouldn't argue the point for one second that it should not be used as such. Of course it should. But carriers and ISPs do not end users conducting commerce make. The carriers and ISPs are only concerned about their own commerce. The distinction here is that end users' needs demand that they be able to conduct both personal and commercial activities over the Internet, and those needs are not always aligned with the motives and the means by which service providers seek to fulfill their own greeds. On the one hand you have the service providers at war with one another doing their own brand of Internet commercialization, which has nothing to do, intrinsically, with end users being able to conduct commerce on the 'net... And on the other hand, there are the needs of end users who seek to utilize "the Internet" (not just MSPG or ATHM, but "the" Internet) for both personal AND commercial purposes in a relatively unencumbered manner. What, in the final analysis, is the commercial model of the 'net supposed to be all about, anyway? It's supposed to be about any to any, anytime, anywhere. But not to worry. As I stated in my previous post, electronic traffic cops [gateways and gatekeepers] and other forms of mediation and accounting platforms will make it all interwork with itself, and for the privilege, we'll only be asked to pay a token, albeit hidden, interoperability tax for the transparency of it all. I'm not saying how much that tax will be, but rest assured that the overhead associated with interoperability will be high by any measure, by the time we're ready for the next wave of open platform experimentation on the 'net. And so it goes... Regards, Frank Coluccio