Antitrust was the talk of the newspaper and online industries. In early June the U.S. Justice Department said it was studying the network that Microsoft aimed to launch in August. Just by clicking on the proper icon available through the Windows 95 operating system, people could join the Microsoft Network. And some newspapers and other online services feared that Microsoft could stifle the competition. In a year Windows might sell 20-40 million copies; what if several million users clicked? Newspapers worried increasingly about the Microsoft Network and other online services. American Opinion Research of Princeton, N.J., found that almost a fifth of the surveyed editors and publishers thought they might lose more advertising to online services than to television. Nearly three-quarters said the business was in good shape now. Just a half felt the same would be true by the year 2005.[4.32] The newspaper chains tried to fight back. Large papers now owned 11 percent of the shares in Netscape Communications, the wizards behind the fastest and best browser on the Web. For the moment things seemed fine for the public. Netscape came up with new wrinkles that other companies didn’t offer, such as the ability for Web pages to sprout color backgrounds without much fuss. But so far it was working with standards-setting bodies rather than saying, “Hey, you guys, these features will be _mine_ alone.” I just hoped that in the future Netscape wouldn’t fashion its software to bind people to specific sources of news from conglomerates such as Knight-Ridder. Perhaps half the people cruising the Web were now using Netscape. In a buying spree of its own, America Online purchased Internet fixtures such as WAIS Inc., the software company. WAIS had made some of the best publishing tools on the Net. America Online also bought the WebCrawler, a first-rate index to the Web. The company acquired Global Net Navigator, too, the wonderfully Netcentric magazine from O’Reilly and Associates, a guardian of Net culture. Just like Frank Daniels III, Tim O’Reilly alluded to the cost of online services. Explaining the sale, he told a GNN mailing list that “in order to really do justice to the information problem GNN was created to solve, GNN would have to be scaled up beyond our ability to fund it on our own. With many large players entering the Internet information services market, the best way to keep our lead was to team up with one of them.” The most dramatic—and, some critics might say, ominous—alliance may have happened when MCI teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to form a new partnership that could offer many kinds of material on the Net. It committed as much as $2 billion toward his News Corporation.