Some get-rich-quickers, of course, also were jostling for virtual tenants; even Canter and Siegel showed up by way of an area called Cybersell, and I enjoyed the irony. C & S had carpet bombed thousands of newsgroups with the same message—while encouraging other merchants to ignore conventional Netiquette—and yet now they were also relying on the more focused approach of a Web area. Phone companies, too, wanted to run malls on the World Wide Web. And that created problems for some. While the Net might use their phone lines, many of these corporations felt out of place in an anarchistic environment over which they had far less than the accustomed amount of control. In the mall business they would be competing against nimble entrepreneurs like Zeeff and Fry. Still, phone companies could take advantage of their existing networks to one extent or another, and if the Yellow Pages were going online in a new incarnation, then the Baby Bells and AT&T wanted their share of the business. Of all the mall-related efforts in early 1995, the most ambitious may have been from a phone company, MCI. It exemplified—as I soon discovered in the most direct of ways—both the best and the worst of Big Business on the Web. MCI’s Giant Cybermall and the Search For Darlene MCI and the Internet had A History. The Net used phone lines from many companies, but MCI had long been one of the major players here; some 40 percent of the Internet traffic in the United States passed over its cables, and nowadays the senior vice-president of data architecture was none other than Vint Cerf. As much as anyone he was Mr. Net, one of the founding fathers. MCI also employed the head of a standard-setting body called the Internet Engineering Task Force. Unsurprisingly, MCI marketers were coming out with statements in the vein of: _When you think Internet, we want you to think of us._ I asked a product manager how much of the Net-related commerce he could envision involving an electronic marketplace from MCI. Well, he said, MCI had around one-fifth of the long-distance business in the U.S.—and why not the same share on the Internet? Clearly, however, if MCI wanted to woo the Larry Grants of this world, it faced a major marketing problem. Just like Jon Zeeff, it would have to sell business people on the Net as a vehicle for their messages; and that meant _lots_ of education, not just hype. MCI, moreover, was offering a range of services far, far broader than Zeeff’s. In an MCI-perfect world, you would advertise your business by way of marketplaceMCI. Prospective customers on the Net could browse through a giant online directory and follow a link to your electronic storefront. MCI would cleverly lure them to its area. People would be able to retrieve voice phone numbers in far-off cities and enjoy other information services for free.