The show was so good that pretty soon the cookies hardly mattered to me. The presentation by Max and the rest of the IIA team was virtuoso. They looked like such nice guys, you just couldn’t help liking them, in their foolish IIA T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. The school kids looked great, and having Dr. Eli Noam as a speaker really impressed everyone. When it was time to take questions, however, nobody wanted to hear from the Bronx kids or the big-name professor. People only wanted to hear about the relationship between IDT and the IIA, and whether the service was completely free or not. Max and his crew were definitely winning the day, but I could see a strange division emerging from the reporters. The mainstream press was becoming more and more sympathetic to the IIA guys as the afternoon wore on, and the questions they were asking were more and more like cotton candy, the kind you love to get. On the other hand, the fringe press, which consisted mostly of a few Internet specialty publishers, many of whom had ownership interests in competing services, was becoming more and more abusive and reckless in their questioning. Max handled each of their attacks with good-natured equanimity, and neutralized them completely. I bristled, but said nothing, although several of these questions were actually slanderous attacks on me personally. I also acted with good-natured equanimity. I gnashed fruit between my teeth instead of jumping on the backs of these phony reporters and beating them savagely about the head and face with one of my expensive pineapples.

Then something unexpected happened. One of the reporters referred to our invited IIA users as stooges. The “stooges” became incensed and turned on the reporter. Several young professionals we had never seen before jumped up and declared that they were also IIA users, loved the IIA, and resented being labeled. It had become a revival meeting, as each one stood up and demanded to share with the audience his or her own personal, glowing experiences with the IIA. I was loving every minute of it. People were standing up just to tell Max what a great job he was doing and to keep up the good work. I think one young girl in blue jeans actually ran up on stage and kissed him. You could not have orchestrated such a performance if you’d tried. Two hours later, almost all of the press had filed out, and I was exultant. I say almost all of the press because a full three hours after the press conference had ended, I still couldn’t approach Max and Steve to tell them how proud I was of them. One Internet “reporter” was still engaged in an argument with Max and five users of the IIA service, and it seemed he wasn’t going home or giving up, ever. I flew home and figured I’d congratulate them in the office tomorrow.

The next day we really had something to crow about. The Washington Post had written an article about how great the IIA was and how everyone should use it. They went on to write a long piece that detailed the dangers of having innocent people or groups disgraced on the Internet. The example of what had happened to the IIA was explained in depth, and the reporter pointed out the unfairness of the attack and exonerated us completely. We didn’t hear from the Internet vigilantes again.

Alas, sometimes you can win every battle and still lose the war. It would have seemed that the road to riches and industry leadership lay wide open before us and we had nothing left to do but collect the prize. Unfortunately for us, while this whole fight was going on, something had happened in the industry that made the whole victory pointless. The Internet was growing up. The number of services had increased tenfold, and people were no longer spending a few minutes a day on the Net, they were spending hours. Now the cost of telephone time really mattered. Users were unwilling to pay us 15¢ a minute anymore, because this amounted to $600 per month for someone who used the Net three hours a day. Of course, nobody would pay AT&T 25¢ a minute either for long-distance access, but this was small satisfaction to us. What people really wanted was local access in their own area codes. We weren’t offering this, and slowly but surely, our billable minutes began to fall. Soon we were losing money again, and I had had enough. I needed to refocus and save the business that was still profitable, and so I decided to cut out our Internet service.