Disney's Go.com: tragic kingdom
By Jon Katz
First Amendment Center scholar
12.15.98
What do you think? Have your say in The Forum.
Join the Katz-alert listserv: E-mail katzlist-join@jefferson.fac.org.
This week, the Mouse arrived in force on the Internet, premiering Go.com, the most
expensive, skillful, and potentially successful effort ever by mainstream media corporations
to dominate the commerce and information culture of the Internet.
If there's anything rarer or more dangerous than a giant corporation moving online, it's a
giant corporation that treats its customers well and makes life easy for them. Go.Com may
be the first-ever Internet media offering that actually is user-friendly, as opposed to the
many that pretend to be.
This week, Disney entered the Portal Wars (portals are gateways to the Internet) in a
major way, and anyone in the tech or computer industry who wants to grasp what synergy,
commercial linkage and user-friendly really means should browse on over there.
You read it here first: As of this week, Microsoft has already lost the Portal Wars — almost
all of its media content efforts, from Slate to MSN to Sidewalk, have failed. The battle of the
commercial portals is now between Disney and AOL, and if you have any money, put it on
the Rapacious Rodent, which is as successful as it is unsavory. Steve Case's moment in the
sun is over almost before it began.
Disney's Go.Com, whose beta version debuted on the Web yesterday, is extraordinarily
easy to use and coherently put together. It personalizes local weather and customizes
news and services almost instantly. It provides free search engines, e-mail and Web pages
to newcomers in seconds, and offers links to constantly updated news, sports and business
information — most of it coming from sites Disney owns and controls. It offers an elaborate,
Disney-sanitized kids' play area with links to topics for grandparents and parents pages,
sites and forums.
The future is dull, safe and greedy. And it's here.
This kind of site also has lots of implications for journalism. Go.com is presenting itself in
much the way newspapers do, only on an Internet scale — as a full-service information
product, guide and index for everyone in the family. With the possible exception of AOL, no
mainstream Web site has defined itself in so supported and fully defined a way. It would be
possible for every member of a family to go on Go.com and be fully informed in a continuous
way — from news to sports to entertainment to games. Users can send and retrieve e-mail,
post to their own Web page, make travel plans, buy movie tickets and be linked to the
Internet and World Wide Web, as well.
While most of journalism has been snookered into hyping Bill Gates as a Millennial Visionary,
those creepy Imagineers have been slaving away day and night.
This is not good news for the already embattled free and idiosyncratic spirits who have
dominated the Internet and Web during its first generation. Disney loves technology, but
always and only in the service of marketing and money.
Disney is the world's most famous sanitizer of information and culture, known wherever it
goes for avoiding controversy, sexuality and the expression of much in the way of political
opinion. It's impossible to know whom to root for in a battle increasingly fought by people
like Bill Gates, Steve Case and Michael Eisner, but like it or not, Disney has suddenly become
one of the major media players on the Internet, if not the primary one.
After years of techno-hype, wild speculation, dumb projections, ruined and made fortunes,
and epidemic crystal-ball gazing, the nature of commercial Net information distribution is
finally beginning to make itself clearer. The Portal Wars will likely determine who has the
largest audience on the Internet, and who makes the most money there. Go.com is Disney's
answer to Yahoo!, America Online, Lycos, Microsoft and the other major Internet
doorways. And Go.com has emerged as a sleeper that few journalists online or off were
paying much attention to.
In the past year, Disney has put more money into its online operations than any media
concern in the world. Last June, Disney traded some Internet operations plus $90 million in
stock for a 43% stake in Infoseek, which will run Go. Disney will then invest $156 million into
Infoseek to promote the new Website on ABC television, which Disney already owns, and on
Disney's cable channels. In fact, Disney will use everything from its cruise ships to its theme
parks to tout Go.com, brazenly plunging in even where its primary rival Time Warner
continues to struggle with its Pathfinder site.
Suddenly it's become clear just why Disney has been amassing so diverse a media and
information conglomerate. It seeks to become the first major portal that doesn't see its
primary mission as steering people to the content of other sites, but as providing almost
everything an information consumer could want within the portal itself. This is a radical
new idea, and Disney has the cash and initial properties to pull it off. It also has something
few other technology or digital companies can demonstrate — an understanding of service,
image and customer relations.
In the past year, it's become more apparent that the battle for Internet commercial
domination will be waged by giant information, entertainment and service gateways like
Microsoft, Yahoo! and the newly reconfigured AOL. Disney is already a much bigger
presence on the Net than many people realize. It owns espn.com, the sports site,
abcnews.com, (one of the Web's most visited news sites), and abc.com, one of the largest
soap-opera sites, family.com and disney.com, perhaps the most popular site on the Web for
kids. Last year, Disney bought a chunk of Starwave, the Seattle company that created the
ESPN site. Plus it owns that half share of Infoseek, the vehicle for getting people to all of
the above.
Disney's turf — a total of 300 different Websites, including Showbiz.com — attracts a total
of 23.7 million regular users. Even if only half of them use Go, it will overnight become one of
the largest media entities in the digital — or any — world, dwarfing most TV networks and
magazines (there are hardly any magazines with that many readers) and other print media.
And Go.com may well lure much more than half.
On top of that, Disney has honed its image as a provider of "wholesome" entertainment for
middle-class consumers, a major draw for Net-phobic parents bombarded by years by dumb
and distorted stories in the press about online porn-pushers and predators.
Disney's children's areas and Websites already offer cartoons, games, puzzles and free
software downloads for children. The company can thus present itself as a worry-free
virtual playground, in much the same way it's generated that aura around its theme parks.
Infoseek has already stopped taking ads for online sex sites, to make Go.com even more
comfortable for parents.
The children's area of "Kids" on Go.Com makes AOL's kid's section seem antediluvian. On
Go.com, kids register themselves by age and are digitally ushered into appropriate play
areas. They can download jokes and cartoons and comics, play with characters in Disney
movies and TV shows, send their pals free electronic postcards from Disney.com and pick
from hundreds of activities by posting their ages and information. The children's area on
Go.com offers homework help, environmental and wildlife topics, and, if Disney isn't
censorious enough itself, the site generously offers links to "Family Tools" to "safely surf the
Web, from content filters to must-have shareware."
The children's areas of Go.com are a good place for Web designers and developers to go to
see the new levels to which Disney's designers have taken Web linkage. And in this arena —
kids, education and recreation — Disney has really taken the wood to AOL, which loves to
project a wholesome Main Street image while raking in tons of cash on thousands of sex
chat rooms.
There are no sex chat rooms on or anywhere near Go.com.
On the "Kids" page are links to grandparents sites, which offer health, insurance and other
news and information for older people, Parent Pages offering news, consumer advice, family
bios and personalized family Web pages and help for parents, and "The Nursery," an area for
parents of small children.
The difference is that Yahoo!, Lycos and other portals have never portrayed themselves as
content providers. On many Net companies, content is seen as decidedly un-hip, as costly
and unprofitable. Portals present themselves as gatherers of and guides to other people's
content. Go.com challenges that fundamental assumption with a vengeance. By
incorporating several established and frequently visited media/content sites into Go.com,
Disney has eliminated much of the risk, and almost guaranteed a substantial audience.
Go.com is both a content and search site.
Although AOL does offer some content, Disney is a much more aggressive, well-funded,
synergistic and aggressive competitor. From its first day, Go.com can match AOL on almost
every front, with the possible exception of AOL's teeming sex, community, and
hobby-oriented messaging boards.
Go.com is smart, and reflects the Web savvy of its designers, who have gone to
extraordinary lengths to make users comfortable. The user first sees a page that looks
very much like Yahoo! Registration takes less than a minute, and the site offers instant
e-mail and Web addresses that are ground-breakingly simple to get and use.
But unlike other portals, clicking on Go.com doesn't take users off the site. It simply
re-circulates them within it. Clicking on a link to "news" or "business" or "entertainment" or
"sports" or "kids" leads directly to some form of Mouse-controlled content, and every page,
along with every other Disney Web site, links directly back to Go.
This creates a new kind of portal, one that functions more like a self-enclosed editorial
entity than an Internet gateway. Like the Hotel California, you can check out any time,
but you can never really leave.
And the Mouse doesn't steer people to other people's advertising revenue. On this site, it's
all Disney's.
This is the kind of site AOL has been struggling to create for years, and that Microsoft
tried and failed to create with MSN, or, to a much lesser extent, in its local Sidewalk
operations. Seeing Go.com heightens the dramatic failure of Microsoft to create successful
new media content (the much-hyped Web magazine Slate is mired at about 20,000 paid
subscribers and would long ago have folded if not for its owners' deep pockets). It also
heightens AOL's woodenness and notorious callousness with users. For millions of Americans,
those eternal delays logging on to AOL are synonymous with the Internet.
Disney's march towards the Web hasn't gotten any of the attention or hype that Bill Gates'
long struggle to become the Internet's Napoleon has garnered. Go.com may be a watershed
in the evolution of Net and Web media. And not a happy one.
The fact that the site is impressive in a technical, consumer sense doesn't mean it's good
news for the Net, the freest medium in history, a place where individuals and not just
publishers, producers and CEOs get to have their say, make their own media, form their
own communities, set their own editorial agenda.
A month ago, there was one mega-corporation threatening to dominate media online, and
that was Microsoft. Then there was AOL/Sun/Netscape. Now, coming from almost nowhere,
it seems, there's the Mouse, mounting the most skillful, well-funded effort yet. Go.com
makes it instantly clear that Disney will buy whatever it needs to make its Website
competitive. Go.com transcends the entertainment offerings usually associated with
Disney, providing more news in more forms — breaking and political news, business, sports
and entertainment news — than any other site on the Internet. It also offers more links to
more kinds of services than any other site, with the possible exception of Yahoo!
Increasingly the worst fears of the first generation of Internet creators and users are
being realized. The news of the Net is already all about business, money and synergy — and
a handful of powerful corporations worth billions of dollars seeking to dominate and profit
from a free, idiosyncratic and intensely individualistic culture. The creators of the
Internet, technology pioneers such as the late Jonathan Postel, worked to create a medium
that was as free and open as possible. That's why e-mail is free, domain registration and
protocols are open, and Net access so universal. This vision is clearly in peril. Companies
like Disney could hardly operate from a more different ethos.
The geek and nerd generation sneer at the idea that these companies pose a threat to
individual freedom online. From hackers to traders of MP3, they've been navigating the Net
and the Web freely and skillfully, circumventing government and companies for years. But
this is short-sighted and myopic. The arrival and expansion of giant corporations like
Disney present a completely different kind of reality for the Internet. Sooner or later, they
find ways to control and homogenize content and profit off of information. It's their
nature.
Companies that are this big, and with the means and resources to offer so many different
services in so convenient and palatable a form, will draw the middle class by the millions
(Disney doesn't put people on hold for hours when they call asking for help). Because they
are so "wholesome," they are palatable to politicians and entrenched institutions like
journalism and education. They suck up space and marginalize everything around them.
They are almost impossible to compete with. They take the best advances in technology and
use them in the service of mass-marketing, greed, and the presentation of tepid,
inoffensive information.
They leach themselves of point-of-view, controversy, or idiosyncratic expression. Go.com
evokes the best and worst of the theme parks from which it sprang — it's pretty,
comfortable, alluring and utterly unprovocative and inoffensive.
The Portal Wars add urgency to movements like open source and free software. Making and
understanding your own media seems more like a good idea every day.
Browsing through Go.com, a bit shocked by the scope and skill of what I was seeing, I found
that the image that kept popping into my mind wasn't that of a Web site linking to the
weather. It was of the kids in "Jurassic Park" sitting in their Jeep staring at a cup of water
as they heard booming footsteps and the surface started to ripple.
Jon Katz can be e-mailed at jonkatz@bellatlantic.net.
freedomforum.org |
