The new economy started looking a lot like the old when the picket lines went up outside the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where workers are protesting unfair labor practices at New York's most chichi attraction. Few of the attendees, including myself,* let that keep us away from a self-styled, movers' and shakers' "Media Summit," held in the museum for anyone able to cough up over a thousand bucks for admission. The Media Summit turned out to be a daylong talkathon, organized by New York magazine and the Industry Standard, a savvy trade mag, rich in ads and informative insider analysis about the future of new media as a business. Big-time CEOs were there to speak, along with high-level financial analysts, publishers, admen, PBS's Charlie Rose and, to my surprise, me. I was invited to take part in a session called "Big Ideas." More on that later.

High-priced events like this are a way many of the diggerati interact with each other, since most entrepreneurs are so busy pumping out business plans and launching start-ups that they usually only have time to connect online. Michael Wolff, the provocative (or is it provocateur?) author of the insightful book "Burnrate", who also writes New York magazine's widely read media column, opened the day by recounting that he had attended 63 conferences of this type since the Internet era was proclaimed a decade ago. Just a day before, ScreamingMedia.com preempted this summit with a competitive event, also in New York, but at the Chelsea Piers near Silicon Alley. It was advertised as a meeting of mal/CONTENTS, for "rebels, iconoclasts and other radical thinkers." Oddly, I wasn't asked to that one, suggesting that maybe I have crossed to the other side, into the bosom of the modern art-adoring Establishment. The difference in venues suggests opposing answers to that old question of whether business is an art or a science. The screamers went for the latter, the summiteers, the former. Ironically, the conference business about the Internet may be far healthier than many Internet businesses.

At least that was the judgment of the Wall Streeters on hand, who said that the gold rush is no more. Their verdict was that IPO mania has had its run. The market "correction" that burst the bubble, at least for now, cast a pall over the hopes of many in the room who were there to find investors and other magic bullets. (Irony #2: Wolff's column of the week was about a woman who publishes a magazine about spanking called "Stand Corrected," tapping into a healthy market for unhealthy fetishism while making gazillions online.) The otherwise corrected money fetishists in the room, who were so hot to trot recently on Internet "plays," have, with the downturn, shifted into hard-nosed skeptics talking tough about revenues, profits and business models. Where was this logic just a few weeks ago, or should I bother asking? I have never understood "market psychology" because it seems so certifiable, irrational and even criminal in the sense that millions of dollars of other people's money (OPM) get pissed away down rat holes of hype. I was amused when, at the summit's end, Wolff mused that, now that the days of the wild west are gone, it will be all business. "The fun," he said, "is over."

Not quite. This week's New York Observer, which hit the streets as the conference got underway, features my favorite financial writer, Christopher Byron (one of the few who does real homework), suggesting that mismanagement is rife and taking one well-known medical site under the knife in his own often surgical column. "Just what were these people thinking about (other than their underwriting fees) when they decided to take an unproven and untested year-old cyber business known as drKoop.com public in the first place?" He then pointed out that the geniuses behind it have burned through over $60 million (75 percent of their booty) in just eight months, while the stock price has fallen into the toilet. Byron's case studies contrast sharply with most business journalism, which focuses on the daily ups and downs of share prices — in essence just reporting game scores. One has the sense that many of these sites will end up in the not-too-distant future in some Museum of Modern Malpractice when it becomes clear how much wealth was created and then squandered.

One of the hot topics of the day was the skirmish that had been settled the night before between Disney and Time Warner, who had been squabbling over compensation for the retransmission of broadcast signals on cable. Time Warner had yanked Disney's signal off its cable systems at the height of the "sweeps" (ratings) period, publicly blaming Disney for forcing it to deprive customers of the wonders of such shows as the TV hit "Millionaire," which I have ventilated about earlier. This issue worries Internet companies who expect to use cable modems and cable systems (along with wireless) Internet distribution platforms. They fear that they will face similar battles with cable monopolies down the line. "It's all about money," one panelist quipped with someone in the audience shouting out: "It's always all about money." That may be — certainly in this crowd — but there were other questions raised in this latest battle of the media war. The law for example.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says Time Warner broke the law and has threatened to fine the media titan. Industry analyst Dennis McAlpine was quoted by AP on May 4 saying that "both sides look bad. I think it's going to raise some very interesting issues that aren't going to go away just because the two sides have reached a truce. You've got the whole issue of media control." Yes, how about that? As long as fewer and fewer companies control distribution, there will be conflicts between diverse suppliers and a few distributors with the power to squeeze out higher and higher fees. Jeff Chester, of the Center for Media Education, a MediaChannel affiliate, sees the incident as a harbinger of things to come on the Net as AOL and Time Warner "synergize." "Ironically, we owe these two warring, greedy conglomerates a debt of thanks," Chester said. "It's taken a relatively obscure issue — open access to the Internet —' and placed it more prominently among the public."

That is just one of the battles to come as the unbrave new world of the Internet evolves, as mediated by the large companies that own the pipes. AT&T Chairman Michael Armstrong told us about his company's $11 billion investment in wiring the world so that "conduit and content" can come together. He spent quite a few of those billions in buying up John Malone's TCI — a vast cable operation — to ensure that AT&T is and will always be a dominant and profitable force. (Incidentally, Al Gore once called Malone "The Darth Vader of Cable.") Armstrong was one of the few on hand who spoke of the digital divide that limits Internet access for the poor and pledged to help end it. For self-interested reasons, of course: More penetration means more customers.

It went on like that all day — with panels on programming, finance, distribution, advertising and the news world. Rob Glaser of Real Networks bashed Microsoft and spoke compellingly about the promising future of broadband, which will merge our computers and TV sets and profoundly change our viewing habits. Oxygen's Geraldine Laybourne described innovative user-created content on her sites. To his credit, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger put in a few good words for journalism and its importance beyond the bottom line. After Norman Pearlstine, ex-Wall Street Journal honcho turned Time Inc. publisher, admitted that his magazine has cut back on foreign news and that it reports differently for the rest of the world than for America, the Times took a different tack. When asked if his paper did customer surveys on news of the world, Sulzberger said no. "We don't ask people if they want to know about famine in Somalia; we tell them about famine in Somalia because we think they need to know." Punch on!

Finally, late in the day, there was my appearance. The whole idea of Big Ideas seemed to have driven most of the crowd from the room. But those who remained heard my hopes for MediaChannel.org sandwiched between the very smart but marketeerish CEO of PlanetOut, the gay and lesbian site that recently bought up two gay newspapers to add to its virtual monopoly, and a young woman who startled the crowd by revealing that her Web site started making money the very day it went up. She said it now attracts 10 to 12 million hits daily from over 100 countries. And her name is Danny too, only spelled with an i. Hers is the "adult" site Danni's Hard Drive, a home for T&A that is, exotic models and strippers, including herself. She was as sweet as she was striking and politely scoffed at my "offer" to "merge with her assets." It was a bad joke. Perhaps this panel was too, but one being played on me.

My assets were, I fear, out of place, in the sense that I was representing the only admittedly not-for-profit dot-org in the house, the only site openly talking about a mission to change the media and about the need for a global orientation and a critical perspective. I tried to offer a vision of the Internet as a place that could deepen democratic discourse, where ideas and information of a kind excluded by mainstream media could be available. I was selling, but few seemed to be buying. Most of the questions went to the impressively bubbly Danni, whose main concern seems to be credit card fraud.

What a world: strippers push for law and order, while media critics talk to themselves in the ozone of a media summit. It's time to come down to earth.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld Online and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media.