Page 219 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Internet and Its Rad cal Potent al

William Gibson, who was attaining subculture status in North America. While
the liminal experience of cyberspace in cyberpunk science fiction was dysto-
pian and difficult to hype, another technoculture that was more amenable to
the popular press portrayed cyberspace as an “electronic frontier.” John Perry
Barlow, Stuart Brand, and other denizens of the WELL electronic bulletin board
network joined publishers of Wired magazine to cultivate and court the “Digital
Generation.”
Personal computers with modems and software applications such as the
Mosaic Web browser permitted a mass market for Internet-ready machines by
1995. E-mail was a “killer app” that hooked new users. The development of
the free and open-source Linux operating system and the Apache Web server
software platform enabled low-cost Web presence for Web page publishers;
and popular search engines, message boards, and chat rooms provided a sense
of direction in cyberspace for new (or “newbie”) users. The “Internet Christ-
mas” of 1998 inaugurated a takeoff phase for the diffusion of the Internet, as
personal computer makers bundled systems with user accounts for AOL and
other Internet service providers (ISPs). Internet Christmas signaled that the
unruly potentials of the Internet had been tamed for “e-commerce,” and that
commercialization would proceed apace without excessive risk of regulatory
interference.

TEChnoLogy anD PoLiCy
Telecommunications policy and intellectual property law reforms in the
United States were implemented to promote private capitalization of the In-
ternet. Federal policy makers exploited the utopian rhetorics of cyberspace to
promote the Internet as a commercial mass medium on the U.S. model of pri-
vate ownership. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 accomplished a large-
scale deregulation of information services to promote commercialization, even
as it attempted (unsuccessfully) to impose harsh censorship via the “Commu-
nications Decency Act.” Networking was protected from public interest regu-
lation, which gave upstart hardware and software developers more leeway in
competing with established media and telecom companies while providing in-
centives for established players to develop new business models largely free of
regulations.
Policy makers set the commercialization trajectory early in the Clinton ad-
ministration during the “National Information Infrastructure” (NII) discussions
organized by Vice President Albert Gore. This program unlocked markets for
carrying traffic and for providing content. The administration expanded the NII
principles globally to the “Global Information Infrastructure” (GII) guidelines,
as the “content” industries pressed for unprecedented intellectual property pro-
tections in what became the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the
United States and the multilateral rules of the World Intellectual Property Or-
ganization (WIPO). The DMCA, more than any other legislation, helped effect
a “transition from an incentive model of copyright to a control model” that has
roiled the Internet’s cultures of sharing and gift economies ever since.