In 1995, when America Online first allowed its members to surf the Internet and the World Wide Web, seasoned users of the Internet feared being swamped by "newbies" who were unschooled in netiquette and threatened to foul the waters of cyberspace for all time. As it turns out, those fears were misplaced—or perhaps not sufficiently dire. It is AOL itself that is emerging as a potent threat because of its successful and expanding dominance of the cyber-marketplace.

From Kara Swisher's new book, aol.com, it would be easy to conclude that the folks at America Online are wearing the white hats. Swisher, a business journalist, has had a front-row seat in covering the rise of the online industry, perhaps the definitive nineties business story. But she is surprisely unreflective in analyzing the place of AOL and its CEO, Steve Case, in the cultural ethos of the late 1990s.

Launched in 1989, America Online has become—at least for a precarious moment—the preeminent player in cyberspace. Last year, AOL reported a record membership of 13.5 million; those members were viewing an estimated 1 billion pages on the Web daily. AOL has continued to leverage its market strength into market dominance. In August, AOL and other leading Internet partners launched the so-called TeraPOP, one of the largest exchange points on the Internet. TeraPOP can handle 4,000 megabits of information each second and will allow consumers to have significantly faster access to the Internet.

As recently as 1996, many analysts were penning obits for AOL, CompuServe, and other proprietary online services because consumers were flocking to the Internet itself, and the imminent launch of MSN (Microsoft Network) was sure to deliver the mortal blow. Much to our astonishment, it did not turn out that way, and Case, AOL's boy wonder, is on the road to doing to cyberspace what Bill Gates has done to the software industry.

What threat does AOL pose to cyberspace? Look at it this way. The dynamics of cyberspace have changed dramatically over the last four years. Wall Street muscle, Main Street populism, and Madison Avenue marketing have relandscaped cyberspace into a free trader's paradise for global commerce. No entity has been more at the forefront of this development than America Online.

The dominance of AOL has allowed it to do many things. Raise prices, for example. Unlimited access now costs $21.95, 10 percent more than a year ago. Also, member use is tightly scripted in important aspects. Alternative software, such as Microsoft Outlook, may not be used to process e-mail. Thereby, AOL ensures that electronic ads, among many other sales pitches, greet members as they log on, download files, and read e-mail. In addition, AOL may steer members to places they may not want to go. Recently, Walter Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal computer columnist, found himself directed to AOL's Sports Channel after he typed in ESPN. Needless to say, ESPN.com has nothing to do with the Sports Channel.

AOL's boldest corporate move to date was announced in November. The company will acquire Netscape Communications, the pioneer in Web browser software, in a stock-for-stock transaction, totaling $4.2 billion and giving AOL one of Internet's most famous brand names.

AOL's triumph over its competition, well chronicled in Swisher's book, rests on the American obsession with brand names. Nothing, including the Bible, has escaped attempts at branding. Think french fries. Head for McDonald's. Need your taxes done? Try H&R Block. Are you thirsty? Reach for Gatorade. Brands promise many things, including a level of quality, reliability, and service. The brands we use define who we are as consumers, our spending practices, and our likes and dislikes.

THE LURE OF 24-HOUR CHAT

One of Steve Case's brillant realizations was that cyberspace could meet the undiscovered need of Americans to find people like themselves in remote locations and talk with them via live chat rooms, message boards, and e-mail. Case did not invent these cyber-idioms, but he was able to deliver them affordably to a mass audience in a nonthreatening, fun-focused way.

Live online chat, all day, every day, has reshaped conversation for tens of millions of people. The chat rooms and message boards of AOL, and indeed, the entire Internet, are redrafting the rules of civil discourse. The biggest human need that chat rooms have met is our deep desire to talk with people like ourselves.

Motley Fool, Moms Online, ChristianityToday.com (a CTI-owned enterprise, like B&C), and thousands of other groups are using communications technology to allow birds of a feather to flock together in cyberspace. Contemporary Americans are experiencing a level of alienation and dislocation unlike any generation before. Parents, children, grandparents, and friends may be strung out across distant time zones that cover the world. Proximity is a lost cause as Americans are drawn into tag-team parenting, commuter marriages, and distance learning.

Online chat and e-mail mean that I may know a fellow journalist in Cairo better than the man who lives across the street from me. With the invention of AOL's "Buddy Lists," I can instantly know when friends and family are online in order to strike up impromptu conversation. Granted, most of these conversations go like this:

Greetings! How's the weather in Singapore?

Sunny and hot. What's new with you?

I've got a headache and too many deadlines.

Here's a life line: Take a chill pill and e-mail me in the morning. Have a good one ;-)

For many, there is something thrillingly goofy about online chat despite its tendency to flatten emotions and invite misunderstanding. I won't soon forget the one and only time I participated in a so-called AOL live discussion in a chat room, focusing on the sober topic of reporting an adulterous affair of a Christian celebrity. Serious talk in a chat room is more often than not doomed to frustration.

FORGIVENESS FOR THE WINNER

In the course of building its business, AOL has repeatedly infuriated its members, exploited its investors, and alienated its online partners. More than once, the company has found itself facing the prospect of fraud charges. Case himself has been accused of dishonest dealing, and his obsession with AOL broke up his marriage while he was in the midst of a personal relationship with the lone female officer of his company.

But Steve Case is a CEO with nine lives. With his casual dress and calm demeanor, his persona is that of the Boy Scout next door made good—an image reinforced by comfortingly regular online letters to AOL members.

The enduring goodwill that AOL and Case have experienced result in part from the American disposition to overlook the shortcomings of a big winner. If AOL was in bankruptcy today, Case would be vilified by Main Street and Wall Street alike. But instead, AOL's stock has rebounded, and the service had a net increase of 665,000 members during the second quarter of 1998.

And unlike many giants of commerce, Case and AOL have shown a corporate willingness to admit screwups and make needed changes. When tens of thousands of angry members had trouble gaining access to their e-mail in 1996, AOL added a whole fleet of modems. I still get busy signals from AOL from time to time, but not so frequently that I've stopped using the service.

THE ANTISMUT BRIGADE

One of the most revealing passages in aol.com is Swisher's account of the internal debate within America Online on whether the service should offer adult, sexually explicit content as one of its channels. Swisher says the focus of the debate was not on morality but on how such a move would affect the AOL brand name. In the 1980s, the 900 phone-number industry, for example, was heavily tarnished as 900-number sex chat lines gained market share and drew controversy. AOL's focus groups quickly revealed how members were horrified at the prospect of porn on AOL because they were drawn to the supposedly family-friendly AOL brand. Thus, even today, there is no AOL-generated sexually explicit material. But that does not mean that sex chat and digital porn are not exchanged by members 24 hours a day on the service.

No history of the growth of Internet technology in American society could avoid a chapter on the fruitless clash between church, state, commerce, and free speech during the debates over the federal Communications Decency Act.

In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in order to limit trafficking in online smut. The campaign by the leaders of the Religious Right on behalf of CDA unfortunately engaged in inappropriate manipulation and hype. Swisher quotes the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed as saying that the CDA was "one of the most important pieces of legislation in our lifetimes."

CDA advocates obtained off the Internet some of the worst examples of cyberporn and put them before congressmen, demanding quick action.As the story turns out, federal lawmakers were unable to craft language that could survive a First Amendment challenge. Instead, AOL and free Net-speech advocates decisively convinced the Supreme Court that the CDA would suppress constitutionally protected speech. The result was a unanimous decision striking down the law.

The unintended consequence of the CDA campaign has been a setback to legitimate efforts to curb the supply and demand for obscene material delivered throught the Internet. But at least local law enforcement has become cyber-savvy; in the Chicago area, hardly a week goes by when a child porn peddler is not snared by police via the Net.

What can religious leaders learn from the failed CDA effort? I would suggest several things. Politicians are overly influenced by special-interest groups. Reactionary legislation may often cause more problems than it solves. Faithful Christians are too focused on choking off the supply of porn while not doing enough to grapple with the spiritual and psychological aspects of the demand side.

This past fall, the Congress, just prior to recessing for the November election, passed the Son of CDA, the Child On-line Protection Act. This bill, rather than focusing on content, takes aim at service providers and would require porn providers to verify an adult's age before granting access to expicit material. America Online, Disney, and others opposed the measure. But at least AOL is doing a heroic job in the war against e-mail come-ons that seem to arrive daily in members' mailboxes.

President Clinton has signed the bill, but free-speech groups have already filed a federal suit to prevent enforcement.

IN SEARCH OF CONVERGENCE

In aol.com, Swisher acknowledges that she is telling a story that is still very much in progress. In fact, she goes further. It may be true, in one sense, that no one knows what the future holds for AOL or the Internet, but Swisher overstates the degree of our uncertainty. We can safely assume, for example, that computers will continue to get smaller, cheaper, and faster, with the ability to do more for more people. And the biggest goal on the horizon is so-called convergence, the Holy Grail of computer technology, when TV's, radio, computers, telephones, the Internet, home appliances, and the workplace will operate interactively and cooperatively, fullfilling the implicit covenant of computer technology to improve the lives of individuals.

Granted, convergence is some years away. But while the public is obsessed with the curable difficulties associated with Y2K, the so-called Year 2000 programming problem, computer convergence looms as an unparalleled danger to personal privacy, even as it is being promoted as a technological Shangri-La. If IRS computers could access your personal bank account, or if your health insurance company could directly access all your health records, our present standard of personal privacy would be shredded. AOL by itself is nowhere near becoming the Big Brother of cyberspace, but the drive for convergence brings the threat of a Big Brotherlike system ever closer.

This threat, many techno-optimists maintain, will be restrained both by law and and by market forces. But Big Brother is not our only worry. Watch out for the little guy: the crazed hacker with malice on his mind who is just itching to get into the banking system or the Defense Department. The great promise and the great peril of cyberspace is the sovereign individual who, with the Internet at his beck and call, moves through the global network at will and perhaps without restraint.

Timothy Morgan is senior associate editor of Christianity Today

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.