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Deal-making in the Internet business has reached dizzying heights. The latest multi-billion dollar blockbuster has Internet directory service Yahoo! buying the online community GeoCities. Other recent deals include America Online's purchase of Netscape, and high-speed Internet access company At Home's acquisition of Excite, a popular Internet directory. The consolidation frenzy is likely to affect average Internet users in some very real ways.

EVEN THOUGH THE STOCK for many Internet companies is through the roof, most are not making money. Neither At Home nor Excite have ever turned a profit. Bill Loving, technology editor at the Los Angeles Times, and formerly of the Star Tribune, says Internet investors and venture capitalists are growing impatient to see profit, and that's forcing big Internet companies to eat small ones to increase their market share.

Loving: These companies really do have to figure out how to make money and soon. The way they are doing it now is just going for mass-merging, trying to gain some competitive advantage over everybody else by coming up with the ideal whatever the magic combination is, of network and content and portal and e-commerce and that sort of thing.

Shawn Hardin, Executive Vice President and creative director at Snap, says his web site can offer better things to read and watch if the constraints of slow-as-molasses telephone modems are eliminated. For instance, people who browse TV listings on Snap, using a standard internet connection, get plain text and little else. Hardin says a supercharged Snap designed for raw speed can give consumers more useful and exciting information.

Hardin: So you could go in and see your on-demand clip of "E.R." or your on-demand clip of "Friends" and find out if it's an episode you might be interested in or if it's a repeat or what the situation is. And we think the ability to request on demand that 30-second clip which has been produced in the last few days and now delivered to you when you want it is a much richer experience than sort of scrolling through text and information.

Another consequence of the recent mergers and acquisitions is that small, independent Internet access and content companies are quickly falling by the wayside. They rise again as parts of bigger companies, frequently long established media companies like NBC and Disney. The Internet may end up like cable TV, where there are plenty of things to watch but only a few major channels. As the big Internet networks emerge, there may be a little less variety, and independent spirit, on the Web. Snap will be eager to show you those clips of NBC-TV shows E.R and Friends because Snap is part of NBC. Another Internet portal, Go.com is owned by Disney, which owns ABC. Rebecca Eisenberg is a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. She says be aware: portals want to sink their hooks into you.

Eisenberg: It's wise for a consumer to be on the lookout that there's a reason why Disney's web site links only to Disney movies and has so many advertisements for ABC television shows. Consumers need to be aware that they might not be show what is out there, but rather what is out there that's owned by the same company that owns that portal site.

Loving: A lot of web sites really were labors of love by people who thought they were changing the world and participating in the birth of a new medium. That can only take you so far. You've got to make a living off it at some point.