| Home |
| About Us |
| Latest News |
| Features |
| R-100 Index |
| Newsdesk |
| Free Email Alerts |
| - - - - - - - |
| Wireless Business Review |
| - - - - - - - |
| With friends like these… |
|
|
| Wednesday, 07 July 2004 | |
|
…who needs nemeses? Signs that the traditional telecom sector is being revitalised by basic market demand drivers are constantly undermined by the fumbling foul-ups in the new media sector…
Once touted as being positioned to inherit the earth, the dot.com revolutionaries were quickly consigned to inhabit the dearth and the detritus of the Internet meltdown. The denizens of the technology sector spent the turning of the millennium metaphorically inhaling helium, talking in stupid voices and generally 'shouting the odds'. Once out of gas, they awoke to a post-apocalyptic vision of commerce, banking, retail and all the other 'bricks and mortar' words to which the 'e-' prefix has been so clumsily appended – all unchanged by their short-lived online pretensions. Having failed to match the stellar performance of the 'tech darling' stocks, and having suffered on the stock market as a result, traditional telecom carriers and vendors could not avoid being sucked into the sump which was built, lined and filled by the dot.coms. Only residual revenue ballast has enabled the traditional telecom players to keep their heads above the effluent. You have one telephone call There's an apocryphal story about a man arrested for driving while under the influence, on a borderline breathalyser result, who is incarcerated in the criminal cells while his erstwhile passengers – who are undoubtedly drunk – wait in the lobby of the police station for him to be charged or released. Crestfallen, the accused driver listens as the mayhem from the front of the station grows louder and louder. He despairs as the smell of burning curls through the bars of his cell in the form of acrid smoke, caused by his friends setting fire to the 'Wanted' posters'. There's a scream, followed by a sound which may or may not be that of somebody being violently ill. By this stage, the man is sober and scared in equal measure. The cell door opens. A large and upstanding police officer enters. He looks long and hard at the detainee, by now suffused with nervous tension and on the verge of tears. "Your friends aren't doing you any favours out there", he says. Similarly, most telcos did not transgress to the extremes reached by the dot.coms and the more malodorous US telcos. Yet they are tarred by the brush of Enron and WorldCom and countless flea-bitten dot.coms whose only executive principle in business appears to have been 'get out while you're ahead' and '[expletive deleted] the rest of you'. The mainstream telecom business is still in custody following the dot.com fall-out and its one-time chums from the new media field are not helping one bit. No favours, as it were. Even if it is only the largest of the new technology players who have survived, their behaviour seems to be appaling. In the last few weeks: • an AOL employee is alleged to have sold up to 90mn individual email addresses or aliases to spamsters. Upwards of 50% of email traffic is spam; perhaps 80% is spam. ISPs are the gatekeepers of email integrity and the leading bulwarks against the tide of spam so when they mess up, we all suffer. • Internet Explorer (IE), the world's leading Web browser, has been highlighted by the US Computer Emergency Response Team, which says it "does not adequately validate the security context of a frame that has been redirected by a web server. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to evaluate script in different security domains. By causing script to be evaluated in the Local Machine Zone, the attacker could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running IE." Clearly this is mad scientist territory, except that IE is produced by Microsoft and the US CERT is not some Berkeley-based group of cyber-agitprops but, ahem, a branch of the US Department for Homeland Security. And most people use IE. And the advice of the US CERT is to change your browser (which, if you are reading this in IE on a PC, you probably won't); • in the UK, the BBC's online operation has at long last been taken to task up for operating speicialist websites in content areas where the market, unswayed by the BBC's dominant position in information, might choose to ignore its output. The BBC operates one of the most impressive all-round web platforms in the world; perhaps only CNN can get close at the newsier end of events. A Government-mandated commission has called for the UK's state-funded national broadcaster to chop some of its marginal portals – covering areas such as surfing (the seawater variety) and soap operas. It would be too early to describe this decision as a legal 'precedent' in the lawless sphere of cyberspace, but broadcasters and telcos may be tempted to rethink their pre-eminence and their plans. Ouch! The three examples cited above – covering email platforms, web browsers and content provision rights respectively – may not add up to the end of the Internet as we know it. But they don't add up to much to smile about, do they? Meanwhile, grimacing, the old telcos must take their outdated utility moralities and say to the world: we don't do that. Jim Chalmers |
| < Prev |
|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|