The right-sizing of the Internet economy.

Besides issues about e-mail, business survival has been a major challenge online.

In the Feb 10th issue of Crains New York Business I came across an interesting article on the front page: Tech firms abandon Wall St: High costs, hassles lead public companies to go private. It seems that as many of the surviving public dot com companies shrank in size the cost and time to maintain a public company did not go down. To avoid the close scrutiny of Wall Street, many of these battered veterans of the now burst cyber bubble economy are going private using "methods from mergers with private companies to bankruptcy restructurings."

Small is beautiful but not when you've been de-listed from NASDAQ, have millions in debt and no investor confidence in your stock. Then small and private is the most attractive life form in the financial universe. But not for too long, perhaps. There are VC's out there, Crain's reports, that believe some of these very same companies could go public again in two or four years. Fasten your seat beats, this time it might not be a bubble it could be a real roller coaster ride we're in for.

On the bright side there are several dot.coms that have survived that are profitable: MarketWatch.com Inc., Ask Jeeves Inc., LookSmart Ltd. and Autobytel Inc. just recently reported their first quarterly profits. The list of the Internet's publicly held money makers include eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Overture Services Inc., Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc. and E-Trade Group Inc.

Several privately owned dot-coms, including search engines Google and DealTime, say they have been making money, too.

InfoSpace Inc., Netflix Inc. and Overstock.com Inc. may be the next dot-coms to become profitable this year.