At 3:57 pm 2/12/95, Todd Day wrote:
>my biggest bitch about the big providers -
>their protection of what should be "public" information... treating it as
>if they own it. In my view, the second they connected to the net, they
>forfeited any claim they have to keeping their databases private (at
>least the databases that were generated by their customers).
Absolutely 100% affirmative to that: both AOL and CI$ act (and market
themselves) like they're the "Onramps to the Information Superhighway"
which is the most heinous insult to the rest of us out here creating
content that they then take advantage of in the most blatant ways.
For the enormous drain they place on the net's human and machine resources,
they *should* be charged somehow: they're getting huge amounts of benefit
for free and acting like they thought it all up. It's *outrageous*, imho.
And Todd's right: they don't make even the slihgtest effort to share what
they have on _their_ servers, do they!
I'm not sure what can be done about this really, because I don't much want
to end up treating them like they abuse the rest of the net, but tolerance
of their membership flooding the net with idiotic questions before they
even bother to learn what's up (of which I'm one when I want to be, BTW) is
becoming more and more difficult: despite their protestations that they
encourage their membership to listen first. I used to log on to AOL pretty
frequently to teach, etc, and the mentality of the teens/etc on there is
not one of earnest interest in learnign to co-exist and assimilate
themselves into the larger net community.
We can't really boycott them, but I sometimes get the urge...
dave
_______________________________________________
"The Internet is FULL already, so run along!"
|
|
