At Microsoft, we’re looking forward to using the highway to get information out about our products. Today we print millions of pages of product brochures and data sheets, and mail them out to people who ask for them. But we never know how much information to put onto a data sheet; we don’t want to intimidate casual inquirers, and yet there are people out there who want to know all the detailed product specifications. Also, since the information changes fairly rapidly, we are often in the position of having just printed tens of thousands of copies of some brochure, and then having to throw them out because they describe a version of a product we’re replacing. We expect a high percentage of our information dissemination will shift to electronic inquiry, particularly because we serve computer users. We have already eliminated the printing of millions of pages of paper by sending quarterly CD-ROMs and using on-line services to reach professional software developers, some of Microsoft’s most sophisticated customers.
But you won’t have to depend only on what we or any other manufacturer tells you. You’ll be able to examine product reviews in search of less biased information. After you’ve seen the advertising, reviews, and multi-media manuals, you might ask for relevant government regulatory data. You’ll check to see if the vendor has surveyed owners. Then you might dig deeper into one area of particular interest to you—for instance, durability. Or you could seek the advice of sales consultants, human or electronic, who will create and publish specialized reviews for all kinds of products, from drill bits to ballet slippers. Of course you will still ask people you know for recommendations, but efficiently, by electronic mail.
If you’re thinking of doing business with a company or buying a product, you’ll be able to check what others say about it. If you want to buy a refrigerator, you will look for the electronic bulletin boards containing formal and informal reviews of refrigerators and their manufacturers and retailers. You’ll get into the habit of checking these bulletin boards before you make any significant purchase. When you have a compliment or complaint about a record club, a doctor, or even a computer chip, it will be easy to find the place on the network where that company or product is discussed and add your opinion. Ultimately, companies that don’t serve their customers well will see their reputations and their sales decline, while those that do a great job will attract sizable followings through this new form of word of “mouth.”
But the various endorsements and especially the negative comments will have to be examined carefully. They may be motivated more by fanaticism than a genuine desire to share pertinent information.
Let’s say a company is selling an air conditioner that 99.9 percent of its customers are very happy with. One angry consumer in the remaining 0.1 percent can post horrible insults about a brand of air conditioner, the company that manufactures it, and individuals in the company, and keep sending the messages over and over and over. The effect could be compared to sitting in a meeting where everyone has a volume control that could be set from 0 to 1,000, and the normal level of conversation is, say, 3. Then a few people decide to crank their volume up to 1,000 and start shouting. This means that if I happen to look in on the bulletin board because I’m buying an air conditioner, my visit may be a waste of time because all I find there is the shouting. It is unfair to me and to the company selling the air conditioners.
Already, a network etiquette, or “netiquette,” is evolving. As the information highway becomes society’s town square, we will come to expect it to conform to our culture’s mores. There are vast cultural differences around the world, so the highway will be divided into different parts, some dedicated to various cultures, and some specified for global usage. So far, a frontier mentality has prevailed, and participants in electronic forums have been known to lapse into behavior that is antisocial and even illegal. Illegal copies of copyrighted intellectual property, including articles, books, and software applications, are distributed freely. Get-rich-quick scams pop up here and there. Pornography flourishes within the easy reach of children. Single-minded voices rant, sometimes almost incessantly, about products, companies, and people they have come to dislike. Forum participants get horrible insults hurled at them because of some comment they have made. The ease with which an individual, any individual, can share his opinions with the members of a huge electronic community is unprecedented. And the ones who are yelling are able, because the electronic community is so efficient, to take a piece of hate mail and post it on twenty bulletin boards. I’ve seen bulletin boards collapse into foolishness after people start getting shrill. Other participants in the discussion don’t know what to do. Some people yell back; a few try to say rational things. But the shrill comments continue, and that destroys the sense of community.
The Internet, true to its roots as an academic cooperative, has relied on peer pressure for regulation. For example, if someone in a discussion group posts an extraneous comment or, worse, tries to sell something in an electronic forum that is seen by others as a noncommercial setting, the would-be diverger or merchant may get a withering barrage of insults. The enforcement so far has been mostly by self-appointed censors
who “flame” those they believe have crossed the line into antisocial behavior.
The commercial on-line services employ volunteers and professional moderators to monitor conduct on their bulletin boards. Forums that have moderators can filter out some antisocial behavior by refusing to allow insults or copyrighted information to remain on a system’s servers. Most Internet forums remain unmoderated, however. Anything goes, and because people can post messages and information anonymously, little accountability exists. We need a more sophisticated process to gather consensus opinions without depending on the Attorney General’s Consumer Complaints Division to act as a filter. We will have to find some way to force people to turn their volume down so the highway doesn’t become an amplifier for libel or slander or an outlet for venting irritation.
Many providers of Internet access are beginning to restrict entry to forums containing sexually explicit material, and there has been a crackdown on the illegal traffic of copyrighted materials. Some universities are getting students and staff to remove objectionable postings. This rubs some the wrong way, because they see cyberspace as a place where anything goes. The commercial services have had similar problems. There have been complaints about restriction of free speech. And parents were outraged when their family account was closed after their eleven-year-old made an objectionable comment to a moderator. Companies will create special communities on the Internet and will “compete” by having rules about how they are going to deal with these issues.
Politicians are already wrestling with the question of when an on-line service should be treated as a common carrier and when it should be treated as a publisher. Telephone companies are legally considered common carriers. They transport messages without assuming any responsibility for them. If an obscene caller bothers you, the telephone company will cooperate with the police, but nobody thinks it is the phone company’s fault that some creep is calling you and talking dirty. Magazines and newspapers, on the other hand, are publishers. They are legally responsible for their content and can be sued for libel. They also have a strong interest in maintaining their reputation and editorial integrity because that is an important part of their business. Any responsible newspaper checks very carefully before making a previously unpublished allegation about someone—in part because it doesn’t want a libel suit, but also because inaccuracy would hurt its reputation.