PATHS TO DIGITAL MODERNITY 377
emerged in the fi rst half of the 1990s within the context of academic proj-
ects funded by third parties. Smaller independent providers proved to be
the major force behind the spread of Internet access in Germany.
The costs for Internet access were very high at this time. Thanks to
its monopoly, only Deutsche Telekom was able to provide the necessary
dedicated connections for Internet service. Consumers therefore had to
pay twice for Internet access, one fee to a provider and one fee to the
Telekom for the use of the phone line. The liberalization of the telephone
market in the mid-1990s did little to change this situation. Deutsche Tele-
kom still dominated the market for local calls, which was what people
used to connect their modems to their Internet service providers. In re-
sponse to this pricing policy, diff erent initiatives called for an Internet
strike in Germany in 1998, but, according to Deutsche Telekom, not many
users took part.^93 Competing providers either had to build up their own
infrastructure or lease telephone lines from Deutsche Telekom. At the
end of the 1990s, the market was thinned out in this sector, leaving many
of the smaller providers in particular out in the cold.
The transfer of the administration of German Internet addresses to
the DE-NIC (German Network Information Center, manager of the “.de”
domain) in the fi rst half of the 1990s also laid another element of the
foundation needed to support the spread of the Internet in Germany. Af-
ter years of temporary solutions in which the University of Dortmund and
then the University of Karlsruhe took over this task, the most important
German Internet providers banded together in 1996 to create an associa-
tion that would be responsible for the technical sales and administration
related to DE domains.
The GDR, of course, did not live to see the arrival of the Internet Age,
which makes the question of how the SED leadership would have dealt
with this technology a moot point. But, even if the SED had permitted
the controlled development of the Internet, East Germany would have
still lacked the basic infrastructure that was needed in order to use it.
The other points that can be made about the Internet in the GDR are
rather anecdotal: some of the East German universities did have local
networks that were IP ready, and there was a dedicated line between
Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin at the end of the
1980s, which was the only one of its kind to cross the border between the
two German states. The top-level domain reserved for the GDR, namely
“.dd,” was never used because there was never an East German Inter-
net address. Communication via computers was limited to remote data
transmission (RDT) over a few, fragile telephone lines. Over the course of
unifi cation, East German institutions were then connected to the existing
West German network infrastructures. The refurbishment of the telecom-