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To: ftth who wrote (2957)	2/25/1999 9:17:00 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Then why isn't AOL or Yahoo married to Roadrunner?

To: ftth who wrote (2957)	2/26/1999 11:43:00 AM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Dave, I am still pondering what you say are the inherent advantages of a broadband service provider (@Home) owning a portal (Excite) and how this could create lock-in by discouraging @Home users from accessing other portals, e.g., Yahoo, because in your terms, they must then pass through the inTERnet rather than stay within @Home's inTRAnet. I wonder whether this is really such a big advantage in the near term as you seem to imply. Doesn't the major bottleneck only lie on the last mile to the end user? Surely the traffic between @Home and Yahoo is on very fat fiber-optic pipes, even compared to the co-ax connecting me with my MSO. Granted that traffic densities between major portals could be a factor, but I am still not sure whether the degradation of service would be perceptible enough to discourage the @Home-Excite user from surfing over to Yahoo, unless I were trying to access, say, an on-demand episode of "King of the Hill" for 30 frames per second viewing. Do you agree that this matters much more in the future as the net gets populated with very sticky multimedia files? Do you see any concentration of ownership problems that could hurt consumers or will the breathtaking progression of new technologies keep the players honest and the field level and competitive? Sam