There has been an awful lot of whining from Eircom shareholders about the slump in the share price - and certainly many investors are peeved at the heavy sell of Eircom in the run-up to the July flotation. It's hard to have too much sympathy with the punters - anybody who thought they were buying Eircom as a one-way upward bet was seriously deluded by their own greed.

But if Eircom shareholders are feeling a bit short-changed, what about the hordes who poured money into some of the recent Internet flotations in Britain, notably Dixons' demerged Internet service provider, Freeserve and another Internet group eXchange, both of which are now trading well below their flotation prices and apparently are destined to sink further. Remember Freeserve's public share offer was oversubscribed 30 times - a level that makes the Eircom take-up by punters seem quite modest.

Add in the news that British Internet auction house QXL.com - a British variation on e-Bay - is now coming to the market at a third of the valuation that analysts put on the group only two months ago.

So what has changed that has altered investors' attitudes towards Internet stocks on this side of the Atlantic. In the US, Net stocks may have come off the ridiculous levels that at one stage had Yahoo worth more than the Ford motor company but they are still at levels that are anticipating an extraordinary level of growth in the years ahead.

It certainly isn't current earnings that is attracting American investors to the likes of e-Bay and Yahoo - Yahoo is currently trading on a historic price/earnings multiple of 1400, while e-Bay's p/e is a mind-boggling 14,000.

So what has changed in the attitude of investors to British Internet stocks. For a start, their scarcity value seems to have diminished. When Freeserve came to the market in July amid enormous hype, it was the first of its kind. Now there are serious question marks over competition that Internet servers face from me too rivals. The likes of Freeserve are now not seen as defensive stocks.

The Republic, of course, has not yet had an Internet flotation, but we have had the trade sale of Postgem/IOL to Esat for £115 million - nearly three times the price that analysts had been talking about in the run-up to the sale. That sort of price anticipates huge earnings growth at Postgem/IOL despite the challenge that subscription Internet providers like Postgem/IOL and Indigo face from the free providers like Ocean.

This reporter has to confess to being a bit of a sceptic about Internet stocks and the phenomenal valuations that are attached to them. One can understand the sort of valuations put on the likes of Baltimore, which has a proven product and which displays excellent marketing skills in a booming area like e-commerce. But plain vanilla ISPs are another matter - what they provide isn't unique and the competition they face puts a major question mark (at least for this reporter) over their valuations.