David Bowie started his own Internet service provider (ISP) company, giving fans access to rarities and unreleased material, and Sir Paul McCartney played a gig in Liverpool that was witnessed by a couple of hundred people in the club, but by 3.5 million on the Internet. Why do they do it? Because they get to make their own rules. Their agendas may not always be about making money.

"I started up an underground paper. I started up a punk band. I had an upstart TV company ... F*** the Net -- I'm already rich!" said Bob Geldof to a group of Internet entrepreneurs in London, all of whom are all hoping to get stinking rich soon from their Web ventures.

But Geldof, who can be a poetic speaker, wasn't here just to ridicule these aspiring multimillionaires. He was here to talk about the Net.

Yes, the man behind the Live Aid charity concert, which raised 70 million pounds for famine relief in 1985, and the leader of The Boomtown Rats, who were possibly the most famous band to come from Dublin in the '70s, was actually speaking as the co-founder of an Internet startup company called deckchair.com.

Geldof decided to start his travel Web site one day when he realized how much it was going to cost for he and his kids to take a holiday to Florida. After looking online and finding no decent travel sites, he launched his own. The result is one of the most simple, bare-bones sites on the Internet. As he puts it: "Selling airline tickets is not a radical idea," but somebody had to come up with a better way to do it.

What the site ended up being was simply a search engine for air fares. Enter the departure, destination, number of people and the date, and deckchair.com does the rest by listing the lowest-fare results it found in its database of 178 million fares from 500 airlines. The site is the perfect example of what the Web would look like if it were run by neat-freaks. So how does the site make money? It gets a small percentage of each fare. Oh, and it hosts one single banner advertisement at the bottom of the screen.

In typical rock star style, Geldof said that he doesn't like the Internet very much, but he is also quick to admit its significance. Geldof considers the Net to be on par with the printing press: "The invention of the Internet is like Gutenberg inventing movable type.“

"The cliche is that the Net is the new rock and roll," said the man whose record contracts state that he owns the rights to his work in "any other universe, parallel or otherwise."

How exactly are rock and the Internet similar?

The financing of a recording contract is basically a three-year plan, Geldof said, pointing out that it can be compared to the five-year plan of most Internet startups. The record companies "give you enough money to make three singles, an album and a video," he said. "If you don't have a hit, you get dropped, and the record company is out half a million quid."

Most of the entrepreneurs here are hoping not to be one-hit wonders. But Geldof almost seemed to warn them of their long-term insignificance.

The Net is well on its way to becoming an oligopoly, Geldof said, comparing the current model of the Web to the original model of the automobile industry.

"There were 300 automobile companies after Henry Ford started out. Then there were four," he said.

So, if Geldof doesn't think he will necessarily be one of the top dogs and he doesn't need the money, why is he in the game?

When you already have a bank full of money and a "reputation" as a rock and roller, you also get to say things that even people like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison don't get to say. In Geldof's case, he also has a reputation as a social activist, cemented by his staging Live Aid. So when he talks about the social responsibility of Net entrepreneurs, his words have weight.

In characteristic style, Geldof addressed the divide between the information haves and have-nots. "There must be a social idea behind what we're doing," he said.

The way to keep alive in the industry, Geldof added, is "to find something that is human." That human touch doesn't have to change the world; it just has to be new or different. Dot-coms must "give (the users) something radical."