Internet
born not only of the vision of Berners-Lee, but
also that of US scientist Michael Dertonzos,
whose notion of the Information Marketplace
contributed to the creation of the Web.
Commercial interchange began in 1992,
Delphi being the fi rst commercial online service,
followed by America On Line (AOL), Prodigy
and CompuServe, to be dramatically followed in
the browser, server and Internet service provider
market by the arrival of Microsoft (see micro-
soft windows).
In many ways the Internet has evolved into a
global agora, an open space in which public
discourse can be conducted without the
mediation of those in authority and without
the gatekeeping and agenda-setting of the
mass media. Citizens speak to citizens, groups to
groups, across geographical and political bound-
aries (see blogging; blogosphere; network-
ing: social networking; web: world wide
web; web 2.0), and certainly governments are
worried about the freedom of access to and
use of information which computer-mediated
communication allows.
Worries are regularly expressed about such
issues as privacy, spam, identity theft and the
mental and physical health hazards of spending
‘too much time on the Net’, especially now that
networking is no longer tied to computers but
is available through smart phones wherever and
whenever the user feels inclined.
The Internet makes for speed, for instant
exchange, but no old-fashioned postbox ever
accumulated the mountain of e-mails which is
the common lot of the majority of Net users.
Such mountains, however, are indicators of
the shifts in practice and activity in traditional
media systems, marketing and advertising: the
Internet has become the global marketplace, the
world’s shopping mall.
Remarkable is how free the Internet continues
to be, that is in terms of being charge-free,
though on this the tide is slowly beginning to
change. Paywalls to free access are increasing,
since providing information and entertainment
comes at a price that even online advertising
does not sustain.
Th e Internet has thrived on freedom and it has
also been viewed as a force for equality: there
are few fi nancial, social or linguistic barriers to
access and participation; a fact that increasingly
concerns those organizations doing business on
the Net (see net neutrality). Concerns of
another kind are exemplifi ed by widespread state
censorship of Net activity in many countries
worldwide. Paywalls are exceeded in height byinvention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and
computer set the stage for this unprecedented
integration of capabilities. The Internet is at
once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a
mechanism for information dissemination, and
a medium for collaboration and interaction
between individuals and their computers with-
out regard for geographic location.’
Basically, the Internet is the story of comput-
ers being linked up and sharing information- a story that began in the 1960s in the US, the
ideas and the developments emerging out of
the universities but driven by the US govern-
ment’s Advanced Research Project Agency
(ARPA), which was anxious to link computers at
research establishments and to form a network
of information distribution which could survive
a nuclear attack.
In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachus-
sets Institute of Technology (MIT) published
‘Information fl ow in large communication nets’,
the fi rst paper on packet-switching (PS) technol-
ogy. Th e following year another MIT scientist,
J.C.R. Licklider, proposed a global network of
computers to share information in research into
scientifi c and military fi elds. Lawrence Roberts,
also of MIT and later of the University of Cali-
fornia (UCLA), connected the two universities
using dial-up telephone lines. In 1966 Roberts’
paper ‘Towards a cooperative network of time-
shared computers’ outlined what would become
ARPANET, the precusor of the Internet as we
know it. Th is became a reality, coming online in
1969 with four computers connecting universi-
ties, then swiftly increasing.
The term ‘Internet’ was not in general use
before 1974, but two years earlier e-mailing had
become a familiar practice across the distribu-
tion network. Already by 1971 Project Guten-
berg, started up by Michael Hart, was making
electronically available copyright-free books,
the fi rst being the text of the US Declaration
of Independence. Th e fi rst computer ‘chat’ was
conducted at UCLA in 1972.
Th e fi rst desktop workstation was introduced
in 1983 and the Domain Name System introduced
the following year. In 1989 British scientist Tim
Berners-Lee and others at the Geneva laborato-
ries of the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) proposed common protocols
for computer intercommunication globally. Th e
basic idea of the world wide web (www) was
to merge the technologies of personal comput-
ers, computer networking and hypertext into an
easy-to-use global information system. Formed
in 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was