The Net: From

Computers to
Cyberspace
Once upon a time in 1984…
Once upon a time…
Once upon a time in 1997…
In 1969, when few commercial communications networks existed, a U.S. Defense
Department research agency created an experimental system that would eventually
become the Internet 

In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation took over operation of the Internet,
and in the 1990s the NSF turned over the network to private- sector operators.

While the Internet has rapidly increased in scale under commercial ownership, the
technology also con- tinues to reflect the system's research origins 
• Do technologies created by nonprofit research projects-such as
the Internet-differ significantly from systems developed for
commercial use?
• the Internet began as a project of the U.S. government and was
operated by a military agency and the National Science
Foundation before being turned over to the private sector.
• The Internet and its predecessor, the ARPANET, were created by
a group of research contractors at the Advanced Research
Projects Agency.
• The ARPANET was begun in 1969 as an ambitious effort to share
computing resources among researchers across the United
States, mainly at universities 
• Reflected the nonhierarchical structure of its research community.
Decentralization applied not only to infrastructure but also to
network administration and the provision of computer services and
data. 

 
• Commercial systems limited what users could do and did not invite or
allow them to add to the network's capabilities
• The software was generally proprietary, and its source code was not
available to users. The ARPANET, in contrast, was intentionally open to
tinkering by its users. 
• Computer manufacturers responded more quickly to their customers'
desire for data communications, offering customers hardware and
software that would enable them to build their own networks 
• The rise of what became known as "open standards" or "open systems"
was a major trend of the 1970s and 1980s, which helped bring the
networking approaches of the Internet research community and the
computer industry closer together 
• Once the Internet had been privatized, users of cooperative networks
began to switch to Internet service providers
• The ultimate user-driven contribution to Internet content was the
World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the
European high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva,
Switzerland
• Berners-Lee implemented a basic system of Web browsers and
servers at CERN in 1990, and in keeping with the Internet's spirit
of openness, he made the software freely available over the
network.
• In 1993, Marc Andreessen began developing an improved Web
browser called Mosaic, which added features such as color
images to Web pages. 
• In 1994, Andreessen worked on a commercial version of Mosaic
called Netscape, and Microsoft followed with Internet Explorer.
• The appearance of these improved and commercially publicized
Web nearly coincided with the privatization of the Internet in
1995
• The privatization of the Internet finally occurred in the 1990s
• In 1990 the ARPANET was finally decommissioned and a new, faster
network took its place.
• This new backbone was the NSFNET, a high-speed network created by the
National Science Foundation.
•  The appearance of commercial Internet service providers did more than
open access to business users; it also reshaped the image of the Internet to
appeal to corporate customers.
• By the early 1990s there were really two Internets: the nonprofit NSFNET,
with a government-owned backbone and regional service provided indirectly
by commercial service providers, and a commercial Internet, consisting of
the various service providers.
• De facto privatization was already taking place.
• In November 1991, NSF issued a plan under which the
Internet infrastructure would be taken over by several
competitive commercial service providers.
• On April 30, 1995, the old NSFNET backbone was formally
terminated, ending U.S. government ownership of the
Internet.
• The Internet would now comprise a set of commercial,
academic, government, and nonprofit networks in the United
States and, increasingly, abroad.  
• The creative tension between the business and nonprofit
approaches resulted in a more successful system than
either sector could have produced on its own 
 Regulating Teenagers and Teenaged Technology
(Stephanie Ricker Schulte)

• WarGames (1983), the first mass-consumed, visual representation of the Internet,

served as both a vehicle and framework for America’s earliest discussion of the
internet.
• presented the internet simultaneously as a high-tech toy for teenagers and a
weapon for global destruction.
• engaged a “teenaged technology” discourse, which cast both internet technology
itself and its users as rebellious teenagers in need of parental control.
• This discourse enabled policy makers to equate government internet regulation with
parental guidance rather than with suppression of democracy and innovation
• nation’s first comprehensive legislations about the Internet and first ever
federal legislation on computer crime: the Counterfeit Access Device
and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, commonly referred to as
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), hoped to make computer
networks more secure by making illegal unauthorized access to any
government computers, accessing national defense, foreign relations,
or credit-related information.
• The Act remains the precedent for American regulatory internet policy.
• helped construct “Hacker Mystique,” the notion that hackers were
specially empowered in the unknown and unknowable realm of the
internet and that they participated in an insider online subculture.
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were represented both as good capitalist
industry leaders (i.e., wealthy, successful businessmen) and
simultaneously coded as members of antiestablishment subculture, like
teenagers.
• Representations of clearly adult computer-skilled individuals as
“teenaged” and anti-establishment suggested they were both the key to
the future of America and simultaneously a threat to American stability.
From Computers to Cyberspace
(Stephanie Ricker Schulte)
1996: Internet’s World Fair
World Wide Web = icon of
globalization
Established “Internet
Railroad,” global Helped configure the
networking backbone of Internet as an American
trans-oceanic cables to space, global and American
increase connectivity
First three years after
development – 1991-1994 – 1995-1996, 20 million to 40
WWW traffic grew tenfold million users
annually
 • 1995 bestseller, Being Digital,
Nicholas Negroponte wrote the
Internet would “flatten organizations,
globalize society, decentralize control
and help harmonize people”
• Resembles Marshall McLuhan’s
“global village”

McLuhan’s “global village” (1960)

• Internet scholars, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu argued the Internet
would change the political status quo, “challenge the authority of
nation states, move the world to a new post-territorial system”
• creation of a “cyber-utopia” or imperialist dystopia full of a global
village of Americanized consumers?
• Rise of pornography available to children, electronic stalking by child
molesters, violence (Columbine massacre)
• Connection between virtual and real helped reconfigure Internet as a
“cyberspace,” a term coined by William Gibson in 1984 sf novel,
Neuromancer
• Reached zenith in The Matrix (1999)
• Internet envisioned as new, egalitarian, nationwide, democratic public
sphere, a “communicopia”
Bill Gates 1997