Last week it was Walt Disney Co buying 43 per cent of the Internet service Infoseek Corp. The week before it was NBC Inc investing in the online technology news publisher Cnet Inc, a move that has helped Cnet's stock price come close to doubling in less than a month.

Now, virtually every Internet company is considered to be ``in play,'' and Internet stocks are scaling new highs as investors bet on more lucrative deals. ``We're just at the beginning of very significant merger and consolidation activity. My expectation is we will continue to see a number of partnerships, alliances and mergers,'' said Jim Breyer of the Palo Alto,California venture capital firm Accel Partners.

Of course, sharp rises in the price of Internet stocks is nothing new. Shares of several companies from the most popular Internet directory Yahoo Inc to the online bookseller Amazon have been rising most of the year on expectations of a sparkling future.

Professional investors long ago gave up trying to calculate the value of these companies, which by any conventional measure are wildly overpriced as most firms are still not making any money.

But with the Disney and NBC deals, as well as unconfirmed reports that AT&T Corporation had offered to buy America Online Inc and Time Warner Inc held talks with a number of online companies, the picture has changed. The Internet business has taken a giant step out of the fringe and into the mainstream.

Analysts said much of the recent gains in their stock prices are being fuelled by unsophisticated individual investors, who know nothing about judging a company's value, but are hearing a lot about ``Internetportals'' on the six o'clock news.

Companies, like Yahoo, Excite Inc, Infoseek and Lycos provide consumers an entry onto the Internet and add content like news, Web search directories, email and chat services.

It is not hard to understand their appeal for bigger corporations.

The ultimate name of the game in any business is to attract more consumers, and Internet portals have demonstrated an unusual knack fordoing this.

Yahoo, for example, attracts more than 90 million page views per day to its online sites in a business that was virtually unheard of just a few years ago.

``Everyone believes, correctly, that the Internet will change consumer behaviour in various ways,'' Breyer said.

``Increased Internet use may be coming at the expense of other industries, like television, and the leaders in each of these other industries need to put together an effective Internet strategy.''

Along with telecommunications and television networks, analysts said cable companies, particularly Comcast Corp and TCIGroup Inc, were among the most likely investors in Internet businesses. One said the Internet business was the ``logical next step'' for cable companies seeking to expand.

So what is in it for the Internet companies themselves? More than might meet the eye.