But the difficulties Net entrepreneurs have faced obscure the fact that the Internet does not neccessarily equal the "new economy." And the Internet, despite the flames engulfing technology start-ups of every description, just keeps chugging along. Exhibit A: the peer-to-peer movement led by Napster. Love Napster or hate it, it's hard to deny that its success is a function of the structure of the Internet. And even though advertisers are suddenly shying away from the Net, Internet usage rates show no signs of declining. In the year 2000, more people got online and stayed online than ever before: playing games, exchanging music files, and, of course, sending e-mail.

In last year's roundup, in words that will no doubt live on to haunt us, we wrote: "In 1999, the Net grew up and went to work -- and its long-standing promise to change the way we do business became an inescapable reality." There's a bittersweet flavor to those words -- for many, the inescapable reality of this year is having to file for unemployment benefits. So maybe the Net hasn't quite grown up yet -- maybe it's still going through some unexpectedly painful period of puberty.

But change is still afoot. Napster's assault on copyright laws in the year 2000 was just one manifestation of a much wider challenge to traditional concepts of intellectual property posed by the rise of networked computers. While libertarian fantasies of a world without borders or governments in which individual freedom is secured by unbreakable cryptography aren't quite realized yet, it is nonetheless indisputable that in 2000, what was once rhetoric is now reality. Traditional legal approaches to copyright and free speech are being vigorously challenged by digital data transmission in a networked universe. Where it will lead, no one yet knows, but one thing's for sure: Things will be different.

This year, Salon breaks with tradition -- instead of providing our summary of the 10 biggest stories of the year, we're presenting what we think are the five biggest stories, and the five biggest non-stories. And in a year marked by the annihilation of so many dot-coms, we thought we'd take the chance that instant karma might bite us on our collective butt -- we're wishing a not-so-fond farewell to the five Web sites that we think the world really didn't need at all.

The five biggest tech stories of 2000

The dot-com downturn

We all knew it couldn't last. But even the most foaming-at-the-mouth skeptic didn't predict just how fast the Net hyper-boom would plummet into a full-scale dot-com downturn. Suddenly, the ONLY Net business story is a seemingly endless stream of tales of woe, the layoffs of thousands of workers, hundreds of millions of dollars scattered to the wind and scads of abandoned plans for world domination. But for every 10 money-grubbing charlatans who chased after the get-rich-quick scheme du jour now receiving a delicious comeuppance, there was at least one real businessperson who is also unfortunately eating dirt today. Take Toby Lenk, the founder of eToys. Just a year ago, he was the rare Net entrepreneur who business editors and writers would meet and think: "Finally! Someone bright with an impressive executive background and idea that's actually marginally attractive. What parent doesn't want to avoid the screaming brats at a toy store?" But right in the midst of the Christmas rush, eToys has announced that it will run out of money in March, face layoffs and scramble to sell the company. It's enough to make a tech hack nostalgic for all those excessive launch parties. Yes, the dot-com craze is dead. Long-live the dot-com craze!

A Napster-ing we will go

Who could have guessed that when a little MP3-sharing application called Napster was unleashed on the Net, a year ago last month, the music industry would be turned upside down? Thirty million users, a litany of lawsuits and scores of magazine covers later, Napster and its quiet wunderkind founder Shawn Fanning are rock stars.

How profound was the impact of this program? Well, Spin named "Your Hard Drive" its album of the year and nearly every band from Courtney Love to Metallica has felt the need to weigh in on Napster -- with some, like the Smashing Pumpkins, using it as a promotional propaganda tool. And despite the ongoing music-industry lawsuits against Napster, both venture capital firm Hummer Winblad and the Bertelsmann media conglomerate still felt it was a smart move to invest. The SDMI coalition spent the year bickering about whether watermarks could really prevent MP3 pirates from swapping files, and me-too Napster clones like Scour and Gnutella cropped up (and, sometimes, just as quickly closed up shop).

Although it's still unclear whether the ongoing lawsuit will shut Napster down entirely, one thing is patently obvious: The idea of file sharing is not going away any time soon. With Bertelsmann on board, Napster may eventually evolve into a secure subscription service (although how they would do this is murky); but even if Napster shuts down, competitors are eagerly scrambling to take its place. The idea is out of the box already.

Meanwhile, despite the record industry's complaints about piracy, record sales are still up. Could Napster have injected life back into a moribund industry and made fans excited about music again? Or is it really just handicapping artists that are already struggling to get paid?

Free to be, P2P

Peer to Peer, P2P -- on the surface, it sounds like just another buzzword, one of that endless series of acronyms (B2B, B2C) that occasionally overcomes the Net and then, thankfully, disappears again. But P2P seems to have staying power, and after a year of P2P hype it seems almost safe to say that this concept will go down as one of the fundamental killer apps of the Net.

P2P mania was launched, of course, by Napster -- a software program that popularized the notion of connecting computers on a network to each other and letting those users share files and resources directly. A relative of distributed computing (read: SETI@Home, Distributed.net), P2P was first mainly embraced as a way to swap porn, warez and, of course MP3s. Software programs like Napster, Gnutella and FreeNet became popular for just this reason.

But by the end of the year a variety of geeks and entrepreneurs were figuring out new ways to use the P2P concept for everything from search engines to networks for privacy freaks like Mojo Nation, to curing cancer, or just renting out your unused CPU cycles for cash. P2P had even, dare we say it, stolen a bit of the open-source movement's thunder with its utopian idealism and fight-the-man ideology.

Sure, P2P may still prove to be the "Push" of the new millennium, but with the best engineering minds of the Net behind it, we would be surprised if it did.

Showdown at the software programmer's corral

Law and software collided in 2000. For many programmers who previously might have believed that they could code whatever they wanted and never face any consequences, this was the year in which they were forced to recognize that they could be held responsible for what others did with their code. Hackers who only wanted to play DVDs on their Linux machines suddenly found themselves accused of illegally reverse engineering proprietary software. And in the world of music all hell broke loose.

Suddenly, Shawn Fanning wasn't just the wunderkind music-lover behind Napster; he was also a mastermind of copyright infringement. The weight of lawsuits launched by the Axis powers of intellectual property -- the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), sent one company, Scour, into bankruptcy and cost MP3.com hundreds of millions.

Indeed, despite free-speech arguments, even posting links to certain programs became an illegal act in 2000. And while the Napster case and many other lawsuits have not been settled, few would deny that the landscape has changed. Information may want to free, but in 2000, it first had to prove that it was legal.

Wireless rules!

Long touted as the next big high-tech wave, wireless became a major story in 2000. Cellphones became necessities instead of luxury items, and the Web pushed hard onto Palm Pilots and newer personal digital assistants like the Blackberry. The migration wasn't perfect; wireless access remains slow and expensive, plus only the most-trafficked sites are available on most small-screened devices. But grass-roots interest in local area high-bandwidth wireless networks that can connect to the Net is surging and venture capital is still flowing toward mobile start-ups. And while one can theoretically see the appeal in getting apps, news and stock quotes downloaded to your cell, the real attraction of wireless is the same as the old land-lined limited Net: e-mail. When the Blackberry earned the nickname "Crackberry" for its addictive e-mail capabilities, few could deny that wireless communication had made its mark.

The Free Software Project
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