Zonker was justifiably proud of the 300,000 or so accesses a week that the _N & O_’s Web area was enjoying after several months on the Web. But just within a week of start-up in fall 1994, the Time Warner area was drawing more than 80,000 accesses a _day_. That didn’t mean that the _N & O_’s efforts were doomed—hardly. But despite all the talk about the Net being nirvana for smaller companies, Fortune 500 corporations arrived with some advantages of their own. Once readers grew comfortable with a certain area of the Web, they might spend less time on other parts of the Net. This wasn’t so much a pattern at the time, but as mass audiences descended on the Net, corporate logos might count far more. Beyond that, Time Warner already offered a daily version of _Time_—a _newspaper_ in effect. It was just one service among a rackfull of publications. Readers could read up on foreign policy or the latest _Star Trek_ film in _Time_, take in reviews from _Entertainment Weekly_, keep up with Ice-T and other hip-hop musicians in _Vibe_, or fire off questions to authors of best-sellers from Warner Books. An even greater threat to the _N & O_, in the long run, was the fact that Time Warner didn’t just own magazines and book publishers. It also owned _pipes_, including a cable operation in the Raleigh area. And someday it might use cable TV lines to send the Net into homes there, competing with the _N & O_, which had already been providing Internet services. If no antitrust or other legal boundaries existed, then Time Warner would be remiss in its duties to its stockholders if it did not explore this route. Think what this would mean to users of the World Wide Web. If an article came with fancy photos, they might have to wait several minutes for the whole works to reach them at a speed of 14.4 kilobits per second. But suppose Time Warner used cable TV to bring the Internet to them. Their televisions would still work with cable the usual way. But their computers could share the cable and retrieve Web articles and other material in a fraction of the time. Cable modems sold for hundreds of dollars. But pilot projects were going on with other companies, and the cost could soon drop to a fraction of that amount. More important, big, well-financed corporations might be willing to modify the old cable for these new capabilities.[4.15] What did this mean for local, _N & O_-sized companies? Just as high tech had blurred the difference between telephones and televisions, the Net itself was blurring the barriers between local and national. It was unclear whether the public would win or lose.