The catch? You must first provide Free-PC with a load of personal information: household income, kids’ birthdays, the magazines you read, your interest in everything from gardening to astrology. In theory, these facts will help determine the mix of ads and offers that will constantly occupy the bottom and right side of your computer screen. As a Free-PC user, you don’t have the ability to control that part of the display. Unless you slap duct tape on your monitor, you’re a naked target for an endless procession of flashing come-ons, even when you’re offline and trying to stumble through a spreadsheet. It’s sort of a high-tech equivalent of indentured servitude: once you accept the initial payment to the New World of computing and cyberspace, your eyeballs don’t fully belong to you. They belong to Bill Gross.
The idea of free computers isn’t that surprising: as PC prices go down (Gross is paying about $600 per unit, a figure destined to drop much further), a mobile-phone-style arrangement becomes feasible: sign up for Internet service, and the computer is thrown in. The significance of Gross’s plan is in how it dramatically illustrates the current thinking of big Web players. They believe that the Internet will eventually work like the traditional media it displaces: a top-down model where relatively few large disseminators will distribute information and goods to a mass audience, with the whole shebang subsidized by ad dollars and transaction kickbacks.
This idea is also the raison d’Etre of the portal craze. For a year now, Brobdingnagian bucks have been invested on the belief that four or five entry sites to the Web will be as dominant to their medium as TV networks were in the ’50s. Thus the near desperate rush of potential contenders for these slots to consolidate with ““old media’’ players, as in last week’s purchase of Barry Diller’s USA Networks by portal Lycos–a deal so curious that even Wall Street refused to reward it with higher valuations. The expectation is that visitors to Yahoo, Go and the like will dutifully direct their Internet browsing and shopping to those sites chosen for them by portalmeisters.
This is a rather drastic transformation of the original bottom-up Net ethos. The early draw of the Net was user empowerment–a level playing field where power was equally distributed to both ends of the connection. People often cite iconoclastic operations run from bedrooms as prime examples of this empowerment, but big companies could play the bottom-up game, too. Like FedEx, which opened its tracking database to customers, allowing them to routinely fulfill a favorite fantasy of those caught in voice-menu hell: toss aside the laggards and do it yourself.
In contrast, Bill Gross and the portal crew act as if advertising dollars should be the prime determinant of what Web surfers see and do. Another of Gross’s companies (he churns them out from his entrepreneurial mother ship, idealab) is the search engine GoTo. Its revenues come from Web sites that pay to be listed as answers to customer queries. If a GoTo user looks for ““New York Yankees,’’ the first 10 choices are paid advertisers (““Buy Yankees gear at Fogdog Sports’’). On the 11th try you finally get Yankees.com, the official site of the world champs. (On Google, this comes up first.) While Gross is meticulous in acknowledging how his operations work, his philosophy seems to raise the question: who’s in charge here? The answer: not you.
Can top-downers remake the Net in the image of old media? Not while technology is moving at, well, Internet speed. Portals may be hard-pressed to contend with newcomers offering slicker means of Web navigation. And while Bill Gross’s new company created an instant crush for the Compaqs, I suspect users will eventually chafe at its restrictions. Certainly they will learn that there’s no such thing as a free PC.
