Page 139 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

INTERNET

services (BBS). Bell continued to provide financial assistance to the
USENET project, which expanded the user base by providing access
to other communities and eventually to profit-making enterprises.
When NSFNET, which linked five university-based super-computing
centres, became the primary Internet ‘backbone’ (or primary national
infrastructure), it developed an acceptable use policy that prohibited
use of the backbone for activities not in support of research or
education. The intended, and successful, outcome was the encour-
agement of commercial involvement at the local and regional level,
away from the national hub, and the development of privately funded
long-haul networks. When the APRANET was decommissioned in
1995, TCP/IP had marginalised most other network protocols and
was on the way to becoming ‘THE bearer service for the Global
Information Infrastructure’ (Leiner et al., 2000).
In 1989 the Internet was transformed by a development by Tim
Berners Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics
(CERN). Their newprotocol was based on hypertext, which allowed
for the embedding of links in text to other text and brought previously
separate systems together. With this innovation came the World Wide
Web in 1991.
This was followed closely by Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic browser in
1992, which dispensed with the need for complex text interfaces and,
along with innovations to increase bandwidth, opened the Net to new
graphic possibilities. Increasing data traffic resulting in the need for
upgrades was beginning to appear unsustainable by policy-makers and
the NFSNET backbone was fully privatised in the mid-1990s. The
telecommunications industry too began to experience massive
deregulation and privatisation at this time. The line that distinguished
the Internet as a publicly owned resource from a market-driven
communication sphere was becoming increasingly blurred.
With the growth of commercial participation in the Internet, issues
of competition and access have become central to concerns over the
future of the Internet. An exhaustive lawsuit ensued when Microsoft’s
popular Windows ‘98 operating system was released with Microsoft’s
own browser integrated into the desktop, an action that was found in
2000 to contravene the US’s Sherman Antitrust Act in attempting to
monopolise the web browser market. The Microsoft antitrust case was
an indication that the cooperative, open standards ethos that was
integral to the development of the Internet had begun to change
(Goggin, 2000).
Even less aggressive commercial strategies, such as coding,
encryption and architecture development for the protection of

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