The company "carpet-bombed" America with AOL disks; it made sign-up
simple and access cheap. Quickly AOL built a following that was extraordi-
nary for on-line services.[10-32]

The AOL network was not really end-to-end. Lots of intelligence was
built into the software with which one connected to AOL. AOL made that
intelligence work to assure ease of access as well as control where control
was needed. The service held the user's hand, but it required some intelli-
gence to know where the hands were. It was a preprogrammed world, which
users took as they found it. No one built additions to AOL or added func-
tionality to AOL without AOL's permission.

That wasn't the case with all on-line communities. MUDs (multi-user do-
mains), for example, were on-line communities where people were free to
develop new parts of the on-line, virtual, text-based world.[10-33] If you wanted to
add a room to an existing MUD, you simply wrote the code to add the room
and submitted it. The space that got built was as the members built it.

In AOL, the only building was that approved by the town planner -- AOL.
And AOL succeeded in building an extraordinarily popular place.

When the Internet came along, many thought AOL would die. Why pay
to get access to preselected content when you could get access much more
cheaply to the Internet as a whole? But AOL responded to this challenge by
doing what it does best: by building its service to make it easy for users to
find their way onto the Internet. The Internet was one place AOL users
could go, but then there was also the content on AOL. Both would be avail-
able to AOL customers; only the Internet was available to others.

AOL then became another Internet service provider, but with something
extra that came from the content it served. It was an ISP plus, because it also
had its own content. But many simply used the service to get easy access to
the Internet. And AOL then was subject to the fierce competition that every
ISP faced. With some five thousand ISPs across America, there was only so
much power any one ISP had -- even if that ISP had a very large number of
customers.

AOL was built on narrowband telephone lines. When broadband came
along, AOL faced a critical threat. If broadband service was reserved to just
two ISPs, and if it was far superior to the service one could get across the
telephone lines, then AOL faced a great challenge from this emerging
Internet opportunity. If AOL was barred from broadband, then AOL would
be history.

[[163]]

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