Netscape Online

» see netscapeonline.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Netscape Online's whole life fits inside my dial-up years and none of it could have reached me. In 1999 I was on a modem in Turkey, paying an ISP for the account and paying the phone company for every minute of the call on top of that. Britain had built something else. An ISP there could give the account away for nothing, because the carrier handed it a share of the per minute call charge, so the subscription line vanished off the bill and the call line got longer. That arrangement was a product of British telecom pricing and it did not exist where I was.

AOL completed its purchase of Netscape on 17 March 1999 and found itself holding a browser company's name with not much browser business left under it. What it did with that name in Britain was run a free ISP against Freeserve, which Dixons had launched the previous September and which had taken the UK market apart in under a year. Netscape Online was pointed at the part of that market which thought of itself as technical, on the theory that anyone who had used Navigator would trust the badge.

The oldest capture of the front page is from November 1999 and it is a portal in the shape everybody used then. A search box across the top with a dropdown beside it, so the same query could go to Excite UK or to UK Plus, which was the Daily Mail's directory. Two more engines sat under those in the same menu. Nobody had settled yet which search engine was the search engine, and a homepage that shipped with your dial-up account was one of the places that argument was being had.

It worked well enough. Reporting at the time put Netscape Online inside the ten largest ISPs in the country, with a subscriber count believed to be somewhere near a million, though nobody outside AOL could check that figure and AOL never published one.

~ the record ~

~ how free actually worked ~

The free ISPs of that era were not charities and they were not loss leaders either. The money came from the call. British local calls were metered, the access number was priced as a local call, and the carrier passed part of that revenue back to whoever owned the number. The longer you stayed connected the more your ISP earned. A business built that way wants you online, and wants you online slowly.

The flaw was visible from the first day. The model only pays while connection time is the thing being sold. The moment somebody offers a flat monthly fee for unlimited access, the revenue that made free possible stops arriving and the free ISP is left holding the costs with none of the income.

~ the fall ~

Unmetered dial-up arrived in Britain during 2000 and broadband started moving the year after. AOL UK had its own flat rate product by then, sold under the AOL name, which left Netscape Online competing with its own parent for the same households on a pricing model that had stopped working. The brand's entire pitch had been reaching a slightly more experienced customer, and that was exactly the customer who moved to unmetered access first.

~ the day it died ~

AOL UK announced the closure on 21 March 2002 and named 27 June as the date. Users were offered three months of the AOL unmetered service for nothing if they signed up by 31 May. Twenty jobs went with it. The public reason was the growth of unmetered and broadband services, which for once was also the real one.

The domain outlived the service. By May 2002, a month before the switch off, netscapeonline.co.uk was already serving the Netscape.co.uk portal instead, so the address went on answering for years after the thing it was named for had gone. Netscape as a brand had another decade of this ahead of it, getting stapled onto whatever AOL needed a name for.

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