Cyber War May Hit Users The Hardest

A century ago, Spokane enjoyed a front-porch view of the legendary battle among railroad tycoons. Several main lines once steamed through town in the race to dominate transcontinental transportation.

Now there’s a new contest, equally hard-fought, equally important to our pocketbooks.

It’s the breakneck battle between Microsoft and Netscape for domination of the Internet. Don’t let those geeky demeanors fool you. The tactics in this contest would make a 19th-century railroad baron proud.

Microsoft is giving away its new Internet browser software in hopes of pulverizing its competitor, Netscape. Netscape’s Web browsers currently enjoy an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. But Microsoft’s pockets are deep enough to give its product away until Netscape is history. Microsoft has convinced some major Web-page providers to add features incompatible with Netscape’s browser.

Why should anybody care? Three reasons:

The arms race in software forces continual upgrading of computer hardware. For businesses, schools, government offices and home users, this is more than an annoyance; it is incredibly expensive. The number of users who have refused to buy the latest gear raises a question whether the computer industry is competing to serve customer needs or the cutthroat interests of its corporations.

An entirely new product is emerging. It combines a desktop computer with a telephone, a television and a high-speed worldwide research and communications network. It may supersede industries and change lives in the same way railroads did. Who will control it? You? Or Bill Gates?

So far, the Internet enjoys a healthy balance between competition, which breeds innovation, and standardization, which ensures universal access. Netscape’s Web browser works on many computer systems, from Apple to Unix to both old and new Microsoft systems. But Microsoft’s new browser works only on computers using its newest Windows operating systems. If Microsoft seizes the browser market, it will extend its near-monopoly in operating systems and its dominance in applications software. If Microsoft loses the battle, there’s a chance computer users someday will get application software via the Internet instead of buying disks and manuals from Microsoft.

Usually, competition is good for business and good for consumers. But the cyber wars are straining that truth to the limit.

The bruising browser battle has big ramifications for our pocketbooks and also for who controls the means of communication in the next century.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board