the more things change…
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first significant revision of United States telecommunications law in more than sixty years, amending the Communications Act of 1934. Changes included:
- Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allocation
- Title 3 (“cable services”) was controversial as it allowed for cross-ownership of the media. the purpose of the law was “to allow any person to enter any communications business, to allow any communications business to compete in any market against any other.” the main objective of the legislation was the deregulation of the converging broadcasting and telecommunications markets.
This opened up a host of opportunities to enter the telecommunications field. many vendors and companies entered the market, providing products and services that essentially broke the “old school” of telecommunications with the “new and cool” entrants. and, of course, the new emerging models of the internet were a wild west.
I myself worked for a clec (competitive local service provider) and improved my product development and management skills on the new services we were offering to internet service providers (isps) to essentially enable their users” local access numbers” for dialing. -up (remember all those cds you got in the mail?) services.
so with the recent announcement that verizon, which had bought aol last year, had acquired yahoo! i started thinking about the isp market and how the inbox has evolved and changed over the last 10 years. (Forbes described the Verizon/Yahoo deal as the “saddest $5 billion deal in tech history.”)
It’s funny how the breakup of old ma bell (the bell system had a monopoly on providing local phone service in the united states and canada; it split into completely separate companies in 1982) led to the telecommunications law revisions that they then led to innovation and thousands of miles of fiber installed across the country to support what would become the development of the commercial internet.
Fast forward to 2016 and we now see some of the strongholds of web properties (and we’re not talking about pets.com) essentially fading into the same organizations that dissolved 40 years ago.
aol – disappeared. yahoo! – missing. swallowed by verizon. As David Gelles pointed out in the New York Times: “If Verizon gets its way, it will shed its reputation as a big, boring phone company battling a unionized workforce and emerge as a mentioned digital media player at the same time. that snapchat and pokémon… it’s a pivot. At first glance, the acquisitions have almost nothing to do with Verizon’s main lucrative activity: selling data plans to its roughly 110 million cell phone customers.”
so what happens next in the evolution of yahoo/verizon mail inboxes? with the combination of yahoo! and aol, verizon will be a major inbox provider globally and one could reasonably expect major changes to their inboxes.
what verizon did with aol email accounts
well, the good news is that their acquisition of aol didn’t have a dramatic effect on deliverability and it’s probably safe to assume that yahoo! the acquisition may have the same effect, in the short term.
It probably won’t affect your list much either. people with aol addresses didn’t have to change their email address; verizon updated aol email accounts with unlimited storage and more space for email attachments.
what could verizon do with yahoo mail inbox accounts
analysts agree: no one expects real change now, as abc news reports:
- in the usa In the US, Yahoo Mail Inbox is the second most popular service behind Google’s Gmail. It is even more popular in Europe and Latin America. so it makes sense for verizon to keep brand affinity intact, said emarketer analyst paul verna.
- with 225 million users worldwide, “it would be foolish to do anything to screw that up at least in the next six to 12 months,” said randy giusto, principal analyst at outsell.
- “i think yahoo becomes a sub-brand like aol has,” giusto said.
Looking ahead, however, once the integrations of those properties have been consummated, and with the search power and advertising capabilities that Verizon will now have access to, accessing a Verizon Inbox will be based on major factors, including relevancy, targeting, and engaged user behavior.
As we can see, the industry continues to evolve and the “new internet” companies and organizations now being built in a college dorm room or on someone’s coffee table will no doubt have an effect on the future of the marketing channel. .
you can look to the past but embrace the future, which is exactly what google did…and look at where they are.
side note: in 2015, aol still had approximately 2.1 million dial-up accounts. (remember dial-up?) good to see you’re still using my old “remote networking” product.
email!
image credit: rvlsoft/shutterstock.com