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Political economy of the Internet 115

the ban was lifted in 1991 and the NSF was privatised in 1995. The first commercial
email, sent across the Usenet bulletin board system generated furious reaction. Yet,
resistance was limited and short-lived (D. Schiller 2000). Commercialisation was
regarded by most commentators as the inevitable consequence of the Internet
evolving into a mass medium. For Lister et al. (2009: 170): ‘To put it simply:
where a free and open system of communicative networks (the Internet) has
developed within an economic system based on property and profits (capitalism)
one has to come to an accommodation with the other’.
Others, however, stress the influence of policy decisions, highlighting how
governments – particularly the US government – played an active part in
establishing commercial dominance. Schiller (2007) offers one of the most com-
prehensive political-economic accounts, describing how corporations leading the
expansion of information systems or services pressed new demands on govern-
ments, who responded by projecting their policy preferences domestically and
internationally.
Government intervention, in particular by the United States, was pivotal and
sustained – not only in procuring continued R&D funding, but also in advancing
telecoms industry liberalisation; the privatisation of what had been public infor-
mation, strengthening legal rights to private property in information and shifting
global trade and investment rules to favour services. Each of these policy shifts
contributed to the process of accelerated commodification. The Internet became
a ‘state sponsored commercial system’ (Curran and Seaton 2010: 258).
The leading edge of policy has been neoliberal and deregulatory. However,
policy is also organised under constraints, notably the expectations and obligations
of serving the public interest, and tensions between the interests of different
commercial actors, governmental and civil society interests. Policy is a site for
conflicts over values and goals. However, one key factor in considering the
Internet and mass media was that government policy in the United States
required the Global Information Infrastructure to be constructed by private
companies, telecommunications and computing companies, who were becoming
increasingly integrated through joint ownership or alliances with media content
businesses.

The Internetisation of mass media
The drive to tie the Internet to the existing media system is now so far advanced
it is barely contested, even though it flatly confounds many of the predictions
raised earlier – that old media would collapse and that the Internet would provide
the means by which peripheral voices would move to the centre of media systems.
But while it is depressingly easy to prove Negroponte wrong, and point to the
durability of global media giants like Time Warner, Disney and Viacom, it is
clearly wrong to maintain that media power relations remain unaffected. The
Internet has generated challenges to market power, disrupting business models
and patterns of consumption and use, and facilitated profound challenges to