History

Many months back, when Vancouver was first getting wired, I remember knowing of only two listings of web pages - freenet's and someone else's - I don't remember whose. (In case you have any doubt, this is very much an anecdotal history, not an academic one.) There were about 30 sites listed on the other one and I don't remember how many on freenet's, because I only went there once to register the Brock Lab site.
The coolest thing on the web then was Netscape's latest version, which let you put a background picture on your page. Groovy backgrounds of the type and even abounded. Also neat was the proliferation of little icons , , , the omnipresent , etc. Every few weeks or months, a new listing would appear, heralded in van.general, but mostly ignored by all and sundry. Changes were in store, not least of which was the change of bcu.ubc.ca to zoology.ubc.ca which caused me much grief (bcu is actually now interchangeable with zoology in urls and email addresses - try it) but greatest of which was the push to commercialization. I'm actually a big fan of the commercial side of the web. What I didn't like, however was the entrance of big pushy bastards who didn't understand it, didn't know any of its history, or have much respect for the etiquette that had evolved. Enter one Dominion Yellow Pages. I don't mean to disparage Dominion by the previous comment; they actually displayed some measure of reasonableness, as you will see, but this is how I and others felt about their Vancouver Yellow Pages Internet Directory when it was first announced.

Dominion Yellow had a great opportunity to contribute to the web by putting up the yellow pages. This in turn would benefit them by making the yellow pages more accessible, and therefore more valuable to their clientele. The web was and still is a place where useful information valuable to all, is outnumbered fifty to one by a) junk valuable only to the person who put it up, and b) specialty stuff that is useful and interesting to small groups of people. Generic information like the yellow pages is the sort of thing that causes growth in the web user pool. Anyway, they figured that if any of their clients had their own web sites already, they would be more than happy to pay for a link from the directory listing to the client's web site. At a rate of $40 per month. This despite the fact that their clients were already paying a horse-choking wad of money just to be in the yellow pages.

Aside: There is a rule for expressing the value of a network that was invented and is named after someone who has lapsed from my memory. I think I first heard it from Dan Gelbart. It is as follows: The usefulness of a network varies with the square of the number of members. For example, if you were the only person in Vancouver who owned a telephone, the telephone would be of no use at all to you. If there was one other person with a phone, then the telephone would have some small level of usefulness to you. If 10% of people had a phone, it would be almost worth your while to get one yourself because you could use it to communicate with on average 10% of the people you normally communicate with. And if 95% of people owned a phone, the phone would become very valuable to you because you could now use it to communicate with virtually anyone you wished.


What is the relevance of the above aside? The same rule applies to the web, and the better the nodes of the web are linked up to each other, the more valuable the web becomes. Links then are in a sense the infrastructure of the web. From this point of view, it seemed rather parasitic to charge for the links that you create when what gives these links value in the first place is everybody else's free links. This argument was unfortunately lost on Dominion Yellow, despite it's having raged over a week or two on van.general. The second, and more self-serving argument against charging for links is that a database that doesn't charge will be more complete than one that does charge. It can have all those members that the other has, plus those members who do not wish to pay. So any money you squeeze out of the membership side of your database ends up reducing the overall value of the database.

However, in order to make this argument work on Dominion, it was necessary for the other local listings to be well known, well used, and easily found by your garden-variety web-user. It was at this point that we decided to create a listing of all of the local web listings, and solicit the addresses of any that we were not aware of. It was for this reason, and specifically because of Dominion Yellow, that this listing came into existance. We should be so lucky. We were even generous enough to list Dominion Yellow's site, although the link didn't take you there - rather when you clicked on Dominion's link, you got to a page saying ''The Yellow Pages: Let's make them obsolete. This link will be established when Dominion stops charging $40(!) for their links.''

Retreating from the battle, thinking that we had done our small part for the web, however ineffective it may have been, we soon forgot all about Dominion and their Yellow Pages listings. Until to our amazement, weeks later, an email from them arrived saying that they had rethunk their pricing policy and were no longer charging for links, and would we kindly re-establish their link in the list. Which we did, as you can see. With no hard feelings