Wall Street Journal, November 3, 1995 Wall Street is in the throes of Internet mania. Or is it Internet madness? Investors have poured into Internet-related stocks in the past couple of days, pushing some Web darlings such as Spyglass and Netscape Communications to dizzying new heights. "People are blindly investing in anything that says Internet," said Willian Bluestein, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cabridge, Mass. "Everyone wants to buy into the craze," says John Sebrich, who works with mutual-fund investor Mario Gabelli. ... What is the big stampede all about? During the past week or so, some of the highest-profile, highest-flying Internet stocks have actually reported profits, a development the Street wasn't expecting until next year at best. ... "The reason Intuit's moving up is the realization that if you had to do the banking industry over again, you wouldn't use brick and mortar," said Neal P. Miller, manager of Fidelity Investments' New Millennium Fund. "I think the size of this Internet thing is just dawning on everyone," he said. Neil Weintraut said, "Money managers are realizing that there is tremendous strength behind this. It's not just a technology chasing a marketplace." ... [and more gush] ______________________________________________________ Web and Wild [Chart] ______________________________________________________ Percent Yesterday's Change Company Close This Week ______________________________________________________ Spyglass $70.50 +70% Uunet Technologies 67.00 +41% Netcom Online 68.63 +30% Performance Systems 21.25 +30% Intuit 82.75 +21% Netscape 98.25 +21% ______________________________________________________ ----- European Firms Join Research Group In Bid to Guide Internet Development By Douglas Lavin Paris - - Afraid of being frozen out of the booming interest in the Internet, 20 European companies joined together to form the European arm of an Internet research group. The World Wide Web Consortium's European branch will work with the U.S. Web consortium on such global issues as electronic commerce, but it will also work on such international issues as the use of languages other than English on the Web, the multimedia portion of the Internet. "We must assure that the beautiful springtime of the World Wide Web is not also the autumn of the French language," said Elisabeth Dufourcq, France's secretary of state for research at a conference here to announce the creation of the European branch. Several large European technology firms, including Oy Nokia of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany, who are hoping to play a major role in the development of the Internet here ponied up $150,000 to join the consortium. Particularly well-represented are telephone companies who see the Internet as a threat to their ability to control national voice and data networks. Among the European members of the consortium, announced at a conference on the Web here, are British Telecommunications PLC and the national telecommunications companies of France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. All five companies either offer or are planning to offer Internet access. One of the group's key tasks is to ensure that improvements made by such rival companies as Netscape Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp., both members of the U.S. consortium, don't create separate parts of the Internet that can only be read by Microsoft or Netscape software. Membership in the European consortium, which is to be based at the French national computer-research institute, Inria, also shows a remarkable degree of interest in the Web by the French business and government establishment, which only a year ago dismissed the Internet as a American version of France's Minitel network, but now is avidly promoting the Internet's growth. Among the members of the consortium from France are Assurances Generale de France, the insurance company; Electricite de France, the electricty company; Cie. des Machines Bull, the computer maker; Aerospatiale, the aerospace concern; and Thomson-CSF, the arms manufacturer, all of them state-controlled, as well as such private concerns as Alcatel-Alsthom SA and Groupe Michelin. Inria, which already has taken over some Web research work from CERN, the nuclear-research organization in Switzerland where the Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. Mr. Berners-Lee, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is heading both the U.S. and the European research consortia. [End] ----- Nuclear research > munitions research > controlled crypto > controlled commerce > economic espionage > ten thousand-year reign of the PGP-DigiBank-MIT-CERN crypto-commo-libertarian nerds. Phill, what's the admission code to W3 world domination?