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I have given a lot of presentations on the Internet in the past few years, and one question that I seem to have to answer the most is: Are AOL and the Internet the same thing?

The answer is NO. AOL (America On-Line) is to the Internet what Twinkies are to nutrition, or USA Today is to Journalism.

There are currently three big OLSP's (On-Line Service Providers), including America On-Line (AOL), CompuServe and Prodigy. The Microsoft Network (MSN) is going to act as an OLSP as soon as they settle their differences with the US Department of Justice, who is acting on a bunch of complaints from the three mentioned OLSP's, as they (the OLSP's) are afraid that if MicroSoft "bundles" access to the Internet in Windows '95, then it (Micosoft) will have an unfair competitive advantage over them. Uh huh.

The 3 big OLSP's have had a number of years to build a critical mass of users by offering an extremely easy way of accessing their service(s) to a population of computer owners with a PC (or Mac) and a modem.

The three principle OLSP's all have one thing in common: they offer an extremely easy, menu-driven interface to their proprietary systems. They are really not much more than giant mainframes, capable of supporting thousands of concurrent users, all of whom are able to access their proprietary resources at a fairly high cost per hour of connect time.

Among these resources are electronic mail, chat groups, access to libraries of software, support from some vendors, and a limited set of hooks to outside databases, like TRW and Dun & Bradstreet, usually at a premium price over the normal rates. (That "ding" you hear when you access these services is the sound of the cash register going into overdrive.)

On the positive side of the equation, using an OLSP simplifies using your computer to access resources outside of your local hard drive. On the downside, you pay an enormous premium for the privilege. AOL, for example, was recently put on the business end of a class-action suit by a large group of its members on the basis of overcharging users by rounding connect time UP to the next minute, even when the response time was due to technical problems at their (AOL's) end. At $2.95(US) per hour, this can add up very quickly. Apparently, enough users got annoyed with this practice to initiate a lawsuit.

The OLSP's all offer a very pretty front-end to their service. Once you connect, you are presented with a colorful menu from which you can choose a large variety of places to go. As an added feature, some even provide you with "free" advertisements at the bottom of each page transmitted to you. While we won't mention names (okay, it's Prodigy), this essentially means that about 1/8th of your monthly bill is for connect time you are charged for advertisements that you did not request in the first place.

The OLSP's have all recognized that they can not survive in a market where they only allow access to the resources of their own system(s) and selected On-line partners. As a result, they have each taken steps to provide gateways to the rest of the world, via the Internet.

For a point of reference, you can compare an OLSP to a large Pick (or Pick-like) system (with better graphics) that allows many users to share resources concurrently. The Internet, which essentially comprises the rest of the world, is a global network of millions of interconnected networks. An OLSP provides a centralized set of tools and data, while the Internet provides a globally distributed set of tools and data.

By contrast, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) usually just provides a gateway to the Internet, and all of its vast resources. One of the stranger aspects about accessing the Internet is when you get connected, there is no real way of knowing you are actually connected, short of launching a "client" application (like E-Mail or a Web browser). There are no menus to lead you around.

The OLSP's appear to have noticed the handwriting on the wall. They unanimously appear to realize that unless they provide access to the Internet to their users through their systems, they will lose their customer base when the customers get savvy enough to realize that they could get MUCH more stuff for a fraction of the prices they charge.

As a result, the OLSP's are scrambling to provide access to the Internet through their systems. AOL was among the first to offer access to Internet E-Mail. To be fair here, all three of them now offer this service, although CompuServe, in particular, charges a premium (they call it "postage due") on every piece of Internet E-Mail delivered to their customers. CompuServe recently spent 100 MILLION dollars to buy a small start-up company, Spry/O-Reilly, in an attempt to ensure that they would be a competitive force in the market. Many people, including me, feel that they paid WAY too much money for this start-up, who barely had a product on the market at the time of the acquisition. The other two appear to be following suit; AOL bought a big part of ANS, one of the largest "backbones" of the Internet in an attempt to secure their foothold in this extremely competitive market.

The OLSP's have, over time, begun offering gateways to other popular resources of the Internet. AOL, for instance, unleashed several million untrained newbies on UseNet without a word on how they were expected to behave in a society that had a definite, if unwritten, set of rules of protocol, now popularly known as "netiquette". This immediately endeared the AOLers to the rest of Net, resulting in the form of many unhappy Netizens feeling that their pristine society had been overrun by Visigoths, and leading to the immediate stigmatization of any user unfortunate enough to carry the AOL.COM domain fingerprint. The popular phrase for AOLer's on the Net can't be used in this publication, but rhymes with "GasPoles On-Line".

I personally feel that you can get everything you need from your local ISP. To compete against the "big three", they tend to offer a much more competitive pricing schedule and in many cases, much better support and software for accessing the Net.

Our local provider, Delta Internet Services, for example, offers a dial-up account for $24.95(US) per month, which includes 75 hours of connect time (roughly three hours per day - more than enough time to convince your SO that you should get out of the house more often). After that, access time runs about $1 per hour. And all of their connections are 28.8K baud. Compare this to Compuserve, where you pay a "basic rate" of $9-10 per month, PLUS, $2.95 per hour for each hour you spend on the Internet, and it quickly becomes easy to do the math and see that you can save a bunch of moola. To add insult to overcharging, I have yet to see a CompuServe connection that provided even a fraction of the throughput that Delta provides.

In summary, I want to say two things. First, I feel that we can get better access to the Internet - at a much cheaper cost - by going with a local ISP. Secondly, I want to thank AOL for all the diskettes it sends us to market its "service"; we can always use extra scratch disks.

See you next issue.

Jon Sisk
www.jes.com

Original article for Computing News & Review, August 1995

Copyright © 1995 Jonathan E. Sisk.