As long as AOL's and Microsoft's struggle is fought primarily in that final realm, the fight won't be one that most Net users will care about; one mega-corporation's money grab looks pretty much like another's. Things will get far more interesting, however, if the conflict spills over into the other two categories. The Smart Tag controversy is a glimpse of what corporate speech control on the Net looks like -- that's why it has so much of the active Net up in arms. Meanwhile, the more AOL and Microsoft "leverage" their advantages in, respectively, subscribership and software, the more likely they are to start closing off entrances and exits and transforming their fiefdoms into private networks. In the world of instant messaging, each company's users are unable to connect with the other's -- a preview of what corporate control of access on the Net looks like. Think of how it would feel if e-mail worked that way!

In fact, it's not hard to imagine this at all -- because it's exactly how the commercial online world worked before 1994. The smoke of today's AOL/Microsoft war obscures a secret agenda the two companies will never admit to publicly: They don't like the Internet -- and never have.

Microsoft's MSN and AOL were both closed, proprietary networks when the Web exploded and upended their business plans, forcing each to change course radically: Microsoft turned its battleship around to sink Netscape in the browser wars, while AOL dropped its hourly charges. Both companies hooked up their networks to the open Net, while conniving to keep their users just a little fuzzy about where the "branded" AOL or Microsoft turf ended and the rest of the Net began.

Both companies, you can bet, would be far more comfortable in a world without the Internet -- a world in which they governed who could post content on their networks and taxed anyone who made money from it. Seven years ago, only one thing made them accept and embrace the strange new notion of a network that nobody owned or controlled: the overwhelming enthusiasm for the Net on the part of masses of users and developers.

A kind of online "people power" forced open Microsoft's and AOL's doors seven years ago. Today both companies are itching to turn back the clock. Can they do it? They'll certainly try. But if these companies push too hard, those who care about the survival of an independent Web may simply vote with their feet and wallets, as they did once before. If they don't -- and only if they don't -- it will be time to sing a requiem for the Net.

This article has been changed.

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