The new old thing.

• Position: Brief Article

YOU CAN'T BUT HELP hearing and reading about dot-com companies no matter where you turn. What you haven't read or heard much about is dot-com governance. That is changing.

DIRECTORS & BOARDS, as well as our fellow governance scribes and assorted commentators from the investment community, are beginning to put a bit more focus on these boards. After all, it is a stupendous (hopefully, not stupid) amount of shareholder money that is being sucked into these corporate coffers. There is a worry, and rightly so, about just who is minding this big store of shareholder capital. Are dot-com boards following GAGP -- generally accepted governance principles -- that have been hammered out (under a certain amount of duress) over the past two decades for their "old-line" counterparts?

Thinking of Michael Lewis's current best seller on Silicon Valley, The New New Thing, I see this brewing debate over dot-com governance as "the new old thing": In their critiques of dot-com boards, those who care about the role of the board and value-adding oversight practices will be revisiting early chapters in the governance-evolution story. It looks like the issues of board independence and enlightened composition are to be the same flash points.

In this edition you will find two articles (on pages 44 and 48) that provide some informative baseline data about the composition and compensation of Internet company boards. Additional...