Commercializing the Internet

The "commercialization of the Internet" is shorthand for three nearly simultaneous events. They are the removal of restrictions by the National Science Foundation over the use of the Internet for commercial purposes, the founding of Netscape, and the rapid entry of tens of thousands-perhaps hundreds of thousands-of firms into commercial ventures using technologies that employ the suite of TCP/IP standards. These events have now turned every PC into a potential client for Internet applications. The explosion of activity in 1994-95 caught many mainstream and potential market participants by surprise. Until then, the Internet simply failed to make the radar screens of many legal and commercial futurists in the computing and telecommunications industry. For example, as has been widely noted (in the context of antitrust scrutiny), TCP/IP received almost no attention in Bill Gates\´ 1995 book. The Road Ahead, which ostensibly provided a detailed look at Microsoft\´s vision of the future. As another example, the US 1995 Telecommunications Act, the first major overhaul of federal regulation for the communications industry in 60 years, mentions the Internet only once. This occurred even though this piece of legislation is over 1,000 pages long and was the subject of several years\´ worth of lobbying from all the major incumbent telecommunications firms. What happened and why? Enough time has passed for us to look at these events from a distance. Several coincident events led to this unexpected explosion. Understanding this past also helps us understand why the future may be very different.