376 JÜRGEN DANYEL AND ANNETTE SCHUHMANN
The Seeds of the Internet in Germany
The Internet, which is indeed a globalized medium of information and
communication, has been spreading since the mid-1990s. As with mi-
croprocessor technology and personal computers, the development and
introduction of this global network occurred on several parallel tracks at
the same time.^90 It got its start in the United States, where the idea of a
far-reaching network of military research institutions, leading American
universities, and technology companies had been pursued since the be-
ginning of the 1970s. The technological innovations that became the ba-
sis for the Internet—the TCP/IP standard, the HTML mark-up language,
and local computer network connections (LAN)—had been made possi-
ble through generous funding grants provided by the state and the highly
developed research infrastructure in the United States. Alongside these
technological elements, there were also social and cultural factors that
fed into the further diff erentiation of the network idea associated with
the Internet. The Internet as both a concept and technology emerged in
an innovative network milieu “whose dynamics and goals became largely
autonomous from the specifi c purposes of military strategy or supercom-
puting linkups.”^91 Thanks to this liberal idea of networked communication
without hierarchies, the Internet was already poised for social acceptance
even in its very early stages. Its dynamic has often come from unintended
off shoots, such as email, that have established themselves and then infl u-
enced the trajectory of further technological development.
As in the United States, the university milieu and not necessarily the
large technology corporations proved to be the motor behind the estab-
lishment of the Internet in West Germany.^92 A fi rst network hub had al-
ready been set up at the computer center at the University of Karlsruhe
in the mid-1980s, which made it possible to communicate via email with
universities in the United States and other countries that were connected
to it. Scientists in Dortmund took a diff erent path and came up with a con-
cept for an IP network designed to make connections within Europe. Both
projects achieved the fi rst stable dedicated lines, one to New York and the
other to Amsterdam. At the end of the 1980s, the state of Baden-Würt-
temberg invested a great deal of money and energy in order to create a
network that connected the universities and research institutes in the
state. The result of these eff orts was the fi rst regional IP-based network
outside of the United States.
In the early 1990s, the Deutsches Forschungsnetz (German Research
Network, or DFN) began working to create its own IP service. By opt-
ing for the TCP/IP model as opposed to others, Germany followed the
general international trend. The fi rst commercial Internet providers also